Topic: EDUCATION

Starting at a new job in a new workplace is exciting, but it can also be uncomfortable. Regardless of how many jobs you’ve had before, you may suddenly feel like the new kid in class, with all eyes on you. How can you overcome the awkwardness of those first few weeks? Is there any way to feel at ease when you’re brand new? And if you’re the one welcoming a new person to your team, what can you do to smooth the way for them?

It’s helpful to know a bit about what makes these transitions so difficult so you can mitigate the awkwardness.

Your prediction engine fails.

The most significant source of awkwardness is that you just aren’t sure what to expect. The brain is a prediction engine. It wants to accurately forecast what’s going to happen, and a lack of confidence about the future creates anxiety. (That’s the same reason why foreign travel is often more fun in retrospect than it is in the moment.)

When we’re uncertain about what will happen, we default to inaction. This is for two reasons. One, our anxiety motivates us to avoid potential threats or calamities. Two, when we do experience bad outcomes, we’re more likely to blame actions we take rather than things we fail to do. So we convince ourselves that not doing anything is less likely to cause problems. As a result, when you’re not sure what’s going on, it can be difficult to start conversations with new colleagues or to speak up.

This tendency to remain silent is made worse by concerns that you’ll say the wrong thing. Even when we’re talking to people we know well, we tend to avoid saying things we think might be misinterpreted. As it turns out, in reality, people focus mostly on the intent behind what you say rather than the specific words you use to say it. So, new colleagues are unlikely to form a negative impression of you, because they rarely notice the things you were concerned would be awkward. It really is ok to chat with your new colleagues and to ask questions when you’re confused.

To help ease the way for a new colleague, try to make things feel more certain. Introduce them to others in the office. Let them know how the workday ebbs and flows. If you’re working remotely, leave yourself a note to reach out to your new colleague at least once a day so that they don’t get lost in the shuffle.

You don’t know the language.

Even if you’re ready to speak up at work, there’s a whole set of jargon you’re probably unfamiliar with. Every organization has its acronyms for particular departments or processes — not to mention its own terms for people, places, and things. Those first few weeks at a new job can feel like you’ve been dropped into a country in which you speak enough of the language to feel like you ought to understand more of what’s being said around you.

It’s uncomfortable to stop people whenever they use a new term to get them to define it. And people who are fluent in their office jargon can spit out sentences that are completely incomprehensible to the uninitiated. (“I had to get EVPP and VPR to approve a PAR before sending it to OSP.”) So, it’s useful to get a translator. See if a colleague can put together a cheat sheet for you of commonly used acronyms and phrases in the company. (Some smart organizations even include this in their onboarding materials.) Then, get their permission to email or text them when a new phrase comes up that you don’t know. It will be reassuring to know you have a lifeline when you’re not able to fully follow ongoing conversations.

If you’re working with someone new, try to wrap your head around the beginner’s mind. It can be difficult to remember how steeped you are in your organization’s way of speaking. When you find yourself using some of the local jargon, use the term (so that your new colleague gets used to hearing it) and then define it (so that you don’t confuse them completely).

You don’t have a squad — yet.

Perhaps the hardest part of starting a new job is that you don’t have a group of people you feel comfortable with yet. Research suggests that having positive social connections at work is crucial to happiness and job satisfaction. You may see groups of people spending time together and talking about shared experiences, which can make you feel like an outsider, or even isolated. And, chances are, you don’t have a lot of practice integrating yourself into a pre-existing social structure, unless you’ve relocated a lot in your life. We generally only meet a lot of new people when everyone is in the same boat and creating a new social group (such as arriving at college as a first-year student).

Remember that it takes time, and everyone else there was new at one point too. You can start out by having conversations with a few people. Get to know them, and find out how the group engages. Are there coffee breaks or shared lunches? An easy way to meet a group of people is to get someone to serve as your ambassador and to introduce you to others. Don’t be afraid to ask someone to help you to meet your new colleagues. People are generally happy to agree to simple favors like this for their colleagues, especially new ones.

When you have a new colleague at work, help them to get settled into the social scene. You don’t have to commit to being a close friend or to spending time with them outside of work. Just help them to meet a few other people and include them in workplace conversations. It’s particularly valuable to make these introductions when people in the organization are working remotely. Most social interactions in remote workplaces have to be explicitly arranged, so it is easy for a new person to get left out entirely. Ensuring that new hires get connected to others also helps to improve retention.

Ultimately, remember that you are more worried about the awkwardness of being new at the job than anyone else is. The rest of your new colleagues are just going about their daily routines. The best part is that in six weeks or so, most of your anxiety will fade. You will develop new habits, you’ll discover you understand at least half of the new jargon that gets thrown at you, and you’ll have a couple of people who can guide you through the social scene.

Humans are wired to fear the unknown. That’s why uncertainty—whether at the macro level of a global economic, health, or geopolitical crisis or at the micro level (Will I get that job? Will this venture be successful? Am I on the right career path?)—can feel nerve-racking, exhausting, and even debilitating. However, that gut reaction leads people to miss a crucial fact: Uncertainty and possibility are two sides of the same coin.

Consider the achievements you’re most proud of, the moments that transformed your life, the relationships that make your life worth living. We’ll bet that they all happened after a period of uncertainty—one that probably felt stressful but that you nevertheless pushed through to accomplish something great. When we moved abroad, for example, we faced uncertainty about making less money, paying higher taxes, doing more-challenging work, and introducing our children to new schools, a new language, and a new culture. But seven years later we are so grateful for all the possibilities the move opened up.

Our modern-day heroes all have a similar story. Rosa Parks faced great uncertainty when she refused to give up her seat, igniting the Montgomery bus boycott and paving the way for desegregation. Nearly everyone initially thought that Elon Musk and his team would fail when they set out to revolutionize electric vehicles and push the world toward a more environmentally friendly future. They couldn’t have achieved their breakthroughs if they had been afraid of uncertainty.

Uncertainty doesn’t have to paralyze any of us. Over the past decade we have studied innovators and changemakers who’ve learned to navigate it well, and we’ve reviewed the research on topics like resilience and tolerance for ambiguity. The findings are clear: We all can become adept at managing uncertainty and empower ourselves to step confidently into the unknown and seize the opportunity it presents. Applying the following four principles will help you do that.

1. Reframe Your Situation

Most people are loss-averse. Multiple studies demonstrate that the way you frame things affects how you make decisions. The research shows, for instance, that if one treatment for a new disease is described as 95% effective and another as 5% ineffective, people prefer the former even though the two are statistically identical. Every innovation, every change, every transformation—personal or professional—comes with potential upsides and downsides. And though most of us instinctively focus on the latter, it’s possible to shift that mindset and decrease our fear.

One of our favorite ways of doing this is the “infinite game” approach, developed by New York University professor James Carse. His advice is to stop seeing the rules, boundaries, and purpose of the “game” you’re playing—the job you’re after, the project you’ve been assigned, the career path you’re on—as fixed. That puts you in a win-or-lose mentality in which uncertainty heightens your anxiety. In contrast, infinite players recognize uncertainty as an essential part of the game—one that adds an element of surprise and possibility and enables them to challenge their roles and the game’s parameters.

Yvon Chouinard, the cofounder of Patagonia, is an infinite player. As a kid he struggled to fit in, running away from one school, almost failing out of a second, and becoming a “dirtbag” climber after he graduated. But rather than seeing himself as a failure, he recounts in his book Let My People Go Surfing, he “learned at an early age that it’s better to invent your own game; then you can always be a winner.”

Chouinard not only created one of the world’s most successful outdoor-apparel brands but also changed production norms by adopting more-sustainable materials, altered the retail model by refitting old buildings for new shops, and challenged traditional HR policies by introducing practices like on-site childcare. Some of those innovations created uncertainty for the business. For example, Patagonia adopted organic cotton before it became popular, when it was expensive and hard to source. When a financial downturn hit, outsiders encouraged the company to buy cheaper materials. But using organic cotton was in keeping with its values, so Patagonia persisted, despite the cost and the supply risks, and in the end grew its sales while its competitors saw their sales fall.

Chouinard has learned to face uncertainty with courage—and in fact to be energized by it—because he views his role as improving the game, not just playing it. “Managers of a business that want to be around for the next 100 years had better love change,” he advises in his book. “When there [is] no crisis, the wise leader…will invent one.”

Of course, when uncertainty is forced upon us, we often need help reframing. Consider Amy and Michael, a professional couple with four children who moved from the United States to France in 2017 for Michael’s job. When the pandemic started, his position was eliminated, and then companies that initially promised him job offers started stalling. In July 2020, Amy and Michael were scheduled to fly home to the United States, but three days before they left they still didn’t have jobs or even a place to live. Family and friends were asking for updates, and their teenagers harangued them: “You are the worst parents ever! How can you have no clue where we’re going next?”

Two days before their flight, Amy confided to us over lunch that Michael had been offered a job, but neither of them wanted him to accept it. “Should we just take the bird in hand?” she wondered aloud. “I feel like we are such losers.” We encouraged her to reframe. She and Michael were showing resilience and bravery by exploring all possible next steps and holding out for the right one. How lucky their kids were to have parents bold enough to know what they really wanted and wait for it! The couple returned to the States with curiosity and courage and, by summer’s end, had both found jobs they loved as well as a fixer-upper home in a fun location.

2. Prime Yourself for New Risks

Although innovators often talk about eating uncertainty for breakfast, if you dig deeper, you discover some curious habits. When Paul Smith—a designer known for daring color combinations—travels, he always stays in the same hotel, often in the same room. Others we’ve studied book the same airplane seat for every flight, follow the same morning routine, or wear the same clothes. Steve Jobs had a lifetime supply of black turtlenecks.

All those habits provide balance. By reducing uncertainty in one part of your life, they prime you to tolerate more of it in other parts. Some people ground themselves with steady, long-term relationships, for instance. As the serial entrepreneur Sam Yagan, one of Time’s 100 most influential people and the former CEO of Match.com explains, “My best friends are from junior high and high school. I married my high school sweetheart. Given how much ambiguity I traffic in at work, I do look for less in other areas of my life.”

You can also prime yourself for uncertainty by getting to know the kinds of risk you have a natural aversion to or an affinity with. Case in point: Back when Nathan was pursuing a PhD in Silicon Valley and Susannah had started a clothing line that wasn’t yet making money, we had four children to support and were still living off student loans in a few hundred square feet of on-campus housing. At lunch one day, Nathan told his mentor, Tina Seelig, “Let’s face it, if I really had any courage, I would become an entrepreneur, but I’m just not a risk-taker.” Tina disagreed. She explained that there are many types of risks: financial, intellectual, social, emotional, physical, and so on. In Nathan’s situation, avoiding financial risk by pursuing a stable career as an academic—while still taking intellectual risks—was a prudent choice. The important lesson is that knowing which risks you tolerate well can help you see where to push more boldly into the frontier, while knowing which you don’t will help you prepare so that you can approach them with more confidence.

Just as important, you can increase your risk tolerance by taking smaller risks, even in unrelated fields. Consider Piet Coelewij, a former senior executive at Amazon and Philips. When he was thinking of leaving the corporate track to head the expansion of Sonos—then a start-up—in Europe, he decided to take up kickboxing. Coelewij describes himself as “naturally fearful of physical confrontation,” but trying kickboxing helped him build up his muscles for dealing with uncertainty, which made him “more comfortable with higher-risk decisions in other settings with less complete information,” he says. “Once you are in a cycle of lowering fear and developing courage, you create a virtuous circle that allows you to continuously improve.”

3. Do Something

Taking action is one of the most important parts of facing uncertainty, since you learn with each step you take. Research by Timothy Ott and Kathleen Eisenhardt demonstrates that most successful breakthroughs are produced by a series of small steps, not giant bet-the-farm efforts. Starting modestly can be more effective and less anxiety-provoking than trying to do everything at once.

When I ask my undergraduate students at Brandeis what they hope for in their future jobs, their answers typically involve making an impact. They have big, sometimes revolutionary, ideas around how to address climate change and social justice issues. They talk about ways we can improve our efficiency by updating outdated communication systems, and even pitch solutions that could help big corporations market their products to younger consumers. But most of all, they are excited to put their pitches into practice — that is, until they get their first jobs and realize they have much less power than they had imagined.

I feel for them, and for anyone making their way into the corporate world for the very first time. It’s not easy to turn an idea into a reality, especially when you are in an entry-level role with limited resources and connections. The people who do have the power to make big decisions often have their own beliefs and assumptions about how to do business based on what has, and has not, worked in the past. If those people are not on your side, they can present you with some serious roadblocks.

So, how do you work around them and get your big ideas noticed, especially as a young person in the workforce?

I’ll tell you what I tell my students: You don’t. You work with them. To make a real impact, you need to get the right people — people with decision-making power — to listen and believe in you.

Here’s how.

First, figure out who holds the power to implement your idea.

Before you pitch your idea, ask yourself: Who has the power to decide whether or not it will be implemented, and what they will base their decision on?

Sometimes this question will be easier to answer than others, depending on what kind of company you work at. Organizations with a clear, hierarchical structure are more likely to have a well-defined process around who needs to approve an idea before it is executed. But organizations with a flat structure, in which there is no real “person in charge” at each level, can be more difficult to navigate.

Take the time to study these dynamics at your own company. There are a few tools you can use to help you diagnose who holds the ultimate decision-making power. One of the most common is called a RACI matrix. The acronym “RACI” stands for the four roles people usually play on a team or project. Here’s a simple breakdown:

• Responsible: the people who are in charge of completing tasks or reaching an objective.
• Accountable: the person who must sign off on the work of the group mentioned above, and give final approval.
• Consulted: the people who need to give input in order for the group in charge of completing tasks to do their work.
• Informed: the people who need to be updated on the status of the project and the decisions that are being made.

Creating this matrix will help you clarify the roles and responsibilities at each level of your organization. Most likely, the person you identify as “accountable” is the one who will say ultimately say “yes” or “no” to your idea.

Note that it’s rare for one person to have all the deciding power. More likely, it will be broken up among different leaders who are accountable for different teams, projects, or people.

For example, let’s say you have a fresh idea around how to engage a new audience for a particular marketing campaign. It may be easiest (and fastest) to look for the person who drives your overall engagement strategy. This could be the leader of the marketing division, or someone who works closely under them. Using the RACI matrix, you may discover that this person makes the final decisions on engagement initiatives, but also relies heavily on specific members of their leadership team for input, and considers market data before making big decisions.

Whatever team, project, or division your idea falls under, get to know what leaders are involved in those areas of your company, and ask around to learn about what factors they consider when making choices.

Choose your champion.

Even after you identify the decision-maker, it’s unlikely that you will get direct access to them. Few young professionals have the social capital to get their ideas immediately noticed by the right people. That’s why you need a champion — someone to advocate for your idea in the high-level meetings and discussions that you probably won’t be invited to.

Picking the right champion will depend on the magnitude of your idea. If it’s a smaller idea, or one that won’t cause significant disruption (like experimenting with a social media post, or reaching out to a new type of client), you might be able to find a champion who has the direct power to put your idea into motion. But if your idea is more disruptive (updating an age-old business model or restructuring a team’s entire workflow), you might need to find a different kind of champion: someone who has acquired a level of informal power that allows them to exert influence over those who are formally in charge.

Take the previous example of engaging a new audience for a marketing campaign. Your champion might be the chief of staff to the head of the marketing division. While this person won’t have direct decision-making power, they still have influence over the person who does.

That said, before bringing your big idea to a champion, you first need to build a foundation of trust with them. This will take time, and it will need to be developed over a series of projects in which you prove your ability to pitch good ideas, provide evidence that give those ideas merit, and consistently follow through on your assignments or tasks. You need your champion to to respect you as a professional, and believe you are credible if you want them to be your advocate.

To fast-track your relationship, study and analyze your champion’s management style. Then adapt your ways of working to fit their style. By doing so, you will increase the odds of producing work they are aligned with and proud of. When they speak, listen with intention, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Proactively set up feedback sessions with your champion and leverage this feedback into clear goals for improvement.

Do your homework.

Once you build that foundation of trust with your champion, you may feel ready to share your big idea. But wait. It’s critical to stress-test the idea first. This process will allow you to create a more robust and thorough pitch with fewer holes and logic gaps.

Start by gathering feedback from various stakeholders. A stakeholder could be someone directly involved in the decision-making process (who you identified earlier using the RACI matrix), or someone in your organization whose work might be directly impacted by your idea.

Sticking with our previous example, a key stakeholder might be the head of sales. Although the head of sales does not influence decision-making within the marketing division, they may be able to provide you with a perspective you had not considered before, especially if your marketing and sales teams work closely together. Another stakeholder might be a trusted peer or manager on the marketing team whose responsibilities may shift should your idea be implemented. This person may raise or problem or concern you can now address.

Stakeholders often have access to critical information that can strengthen your pitch. Connecting with them can also help you develop advocates throughout the organization.

For a company to be successful, it must find a way to develop talent. It isn’t always possible to hire leadership from the outside. Being able to develop leaders within the ranks will help the company to grow and fill future needs that come about organically.

When I worked for a company that was growing, we knew we had to spend time with our staff to help them grow into the leaders we needed. I created a training format that we used over and over to coach up emerging leaders and prepare them to take on more responsibility.

This training was ongoing. We instilled four principles in their work. This translated the core values of the company into their daily actions. It gave them a foundation to build their individual leadership style.

It didn’t mean that everyone could take on a leadership role. Some people naturally make better leaders. Some people enjoyed keeping their technical focus and didn’t want to change. Others wanted the additional money but not the extra work.

To be able to take on more, the individual also had to show that they could handle their current responsibilities. The example I would use is that the third string punter on a football team wouldn’t be voted captain. While talent isn’t the only requirement, there had to be enough ability to do their job at a high level. If someone isn’t at the top of their game, they would not be viewed as a leader.

We were able to go from a staff that wanted the extra benefits of leadership (more money, promotions, authority to make decisions, etc.), to a staff willing to do what was necessary to improve as leaders. Instead of just showing up and checking off a box, they put in the work to get better.

But for those with leadership potential and the drive to grow their skills, we could provide them foundational knowledge they can rely on to be successful. Here are those four principles:

Principle 1: Take ownership

The first principle was to take ownership. They needed to own their tasks. They had to own the processes and procedures. They had to own the outcomes and the production output.

This is different than being in charge. If they are in charge but don’t own it, they will always find others to blame when things go wrong. They won’t step up to do the extra work necessary when something gets fouled up.

The reality is that there are always going to be outside factors to blame. It is easy to find a scapegoat, because today’s business processes are complex and interconnect with other areas. This gives us plenty of places to point the finger when mistakes happen.

Instead, leaders need to make it their job to keep pushing things forward. They don’t sit back and wait for tasks to be given out to them. They search for ways to improve the team and catch mistakes early to prevent them from turning into major problems.

We emphasized that this was the antithesis to the “us versus them” attitude. We broke down silos by having leaders willing to step beyond their area to work with other teams to solve problems and improve efficiencies.

When everyone takes ownership, people are willing to do what is needed without finding ways to skirt responsibility. By taking ownership, this also meant consistency. It was more than one-time effort. It was exemplified in the habits, routines and patterns, not just in the one-off.

Has this ever happened to you: You debrief from a strategic meeting, only to find you can’t remember anyone besides yourself sharing ideas or contributing input? Many leaders need to be coached to speak up. But what if you have the opposite problem — and you can’t seem to stop talking? This can lead to frustration all around — your team members become frustrated because they want to share their own ideas, and your manager grows frustrated because they want to hear other viewpoints. Your ideas get lost because stakeholders lose patience with your habit of dominating the conversation — and start to tune you out.

If you suspect you may be monopolizing the conversation in meetings, experiment with these tactics to help get your message across.

Measure exactly how much you’re talking.

Take time to reflect after meetings. If you feel like you have been sharing too much, look back and consider who else contributed. Ask yourself honestly: “Did I talk over people?” Estimate how much of the meeting you were speaking.

For example: “I spoke up about one third of the time and talked over Jim twice.” Note that there isn’t a specific set point for how much you should or should not talk. You will need to use your gut. If you notice you have a pattern of talking over others, it’s time for a reset. Moving forward, make an effort to prioritize listening over talking.

Make a rule for yourself regarding when to share. For example: “I won’t speak until at least two other people in the meeting have shared their input,” or “I will limit my sharing to one point.” Or, “I will time myself and allow only three minutes of speaking.”

Of course, this advice won’t work all the time; your input will be needed and solicited when the stakes are high. But for routine meetings, practice pulling back and letting others have the floor. I coach clients to over-index on sticking to their allotted speaking time. While you don’t want to limit your speaking time forever, adhering to the time rule in the beginning will help you build the habit of yielding the floor.

Consider using other ways to share your ideas.

If you excel at creativity, you may come alive in a brainstorming session and quickly generate a wealth of ideas. However, if you tend to ramble when describing those ideas, you could come across as scattered and ill prepared. Consider other ways to organize your ideas and communicate them to audiences. For example, can you keep a running list of your brilliant insights on your computer so you’re better prepared to share them in the next meeting? Or, can you share ideas in a non-meeting setting — for example, in a follow-up email or an internal chat platform?

Use whatever forms of communication are at your disposal to help organize your thoughts. You’ll then communicate well-thought-out concepts when you do share. One client I worked with had many fantastic ideas; however, in her review, her supervisor noted that my client’s ideas got lost when she attempted to verbalize those ideas. This client wasn’t succinct enough and monopolized senior leadership meetings. To help regain her credibility after this review, my client only shared one point of view at a time that was fully flushed out so that she looked more strategic and organized. For important matters, she followed up afterward with another meeting or an email. This strategy helped her regain control of how she spoke in meetings.

Practice compressing your thoughts.

When speaking, make sure that what you’re saying is necessary and impactful. You can even think of your sentences in tweet form: How would I communicate this idea if I were tweeting and facing a character limit? How can I cut my message down to its essence? 

You can also try writing down the thoughts you plan to discuss in a meeting. This will help you see the cadence in how you deliver ideas. Once you establish a rhythm for compressing your thoughts, you won’t need to take much time to prepare and practice.

Think of yourself as an editor eliminating words and ideas that don’t communicate the essence of what you want to share. I worked with one leader who found that she could reliably scale back each of her sentences by about five words. While that may not sound like a lot, those extra words made for more muddled communication. She delivered messages with a more significant impact by trimming back her sentences.

Build in pauses.

Are you giving your colleagues enough time to digest what you say and to ask questions? If not, give yourself a signal to pause.

One client I worked with decided that when he needed to slow down and stop talking, he would pinch himself. This was a signal to take a breath, stop talking, or ask the group questions. This straightforward tactic can be amazingly effective. By slowing down and taking deliberate pauses, you’ll be able to regulate your impulse to overshare, and your message will have a better chance of landing.

Ask for help.

It may be hard to know in the moment if you’re oversharing. A fresh perspective can offer insight. Ask a trusted colleague or advisor to provide insights into how you’re meeting your goal of talking less and listening more.

Request specific feedback: “Did I share my ideas in three minutes or less?” The answer you receive could provide additional insights that you can use for future conversations. One client I worked with decided to have a reciprocal agreement with a trusted peer.  They would make sure to notice each others’ patterns and would then meet once a month to share their perspectives.

While it’s important to share your point of view, it’s critical to know when and how. Experiment with some or all of these tactics to make sure your input is being heard.

For the past two years, leaders have been performing a high-wire act: seeking stable footing while dealing with a disruptive and unpredictable pandemic, struggling to hire amidst a 15-year high in talent shortages, and revamping policies to meet employee demands for more flexibility at work. Multiple waves of coronavirus variants and an outbreak of war in Europe have left leaders in a daunting place — trying to reassure and focus employees in the face of constant uncertainty while having no real clue what will happen next. They are being told to “embrace uncertainty” as if that’s a natural and easy thing to do. (It’s not.) And their own struggles with stress and burnout often take a back seat as they address the rising mental health challenges of their employees.

So many leaders are now caught in the middle of wanting to provide a clear and upbeat message to employees and yet are having to back-pedal and pivot quite frequently as conditions change. It’s an exhausting proposition.

More than ever, leaders need practical strategies for taking care of themselves and their teams. At Potential Project, we have coached thousands of leaders, and we start in a somewhat unexpected place – helping them to understand and manage their minds.  Unfortunately, none of us can physically control our mind which neurologically has its own patterns and default modes, but we can train it so that it’s working with us and not against us.

Here are three things we recommend to leaders to lead in these uncertain times.

Beware of your ego.

Though most of us like to see ourselves as having the best interests of others in mind, the truth is that our ego is a powerful force, committed to our self-interest and self-preservation.

As we rise up in the ranks of leadership, our ego can naturally become inflated. When it does, this puts us at higher risk of poor decisions and missteps. An inflated ego narrows our vision and makes us look for information that confirms what we want to believe. We lose perspective and end up in a leadership bubble where we only see and hear what we want to rather than the full picture. And, in the face of setbacks and criticism, we find it harder to admit and learn from our mistakes.

Last summer, we witnessed a good example of ego in action. Despite the appearance and then surge in the Covid delta variant, James Gorman, CEO of Morgan Stanley, confidently asserted that his employees would be back in the office by September. He even threatened pay cuts for those who didn’t follow the plan and return to the office. When his vision failed to materialize, Gorman at least had the good sense to admit publicly that he was wrong rather than doubling down on a failed plan. “I was wrong on this,” he told CNBC in December.” “I thought we would have been out of it and we’re not. Everybody’s still finding their way.”

Ego can kill our ability to be agile in an unpredictable world. Keeping it in check gives leaders the freedom to be wrong, to make mistakes, to admit to being human, and to move on.

Choose courage over comfort.

As human beings, we’re hardwired to embrace certainty and safety and to avoid danger and discomfort. In fact, sometimes we’ll do nearly everything we can to convince ourselves that staying in our comfort zone is the best thing to do. This is where courage comes in. Courage is different from fearlessness. We can still experience fear about making a difficult decision or delivering negative news, but we find the inner strength to overcome the fear, to shift out of our comfort zones, and to move forward.

Pamela Maynard, the CEO of Avanade, a 45,000-person global technology company, shared with us her experience with fear. In 2020, just six months into her role as CEO, she needed to deal with the realities of the global pandemic. Many organizations were reducing workforce numbers to keep their business afloat. But early on, Pam committed to protecting jobs, even as that felt like a risk. “As a new CEO, it felt challenging to make this decision because I wanted to come in as a leader, drive growth, and hit my targets,” she said. “But in this truly once-in-a-lifetime situation, my most important responsibility was to take care of our people. There was no other option and no greater priority.”

Pam removed chargeability requirements for consultants in the early months of the pandemic and lifted PTO limits as people needed to step away. As a leader, she saw an opportunity to demonstrate real courage to steer the ship through difficult times. She shared a principle that has guided her throughout her career: “Feel the fear and do it anyway.” In this moment, she faced her fear of negatively impacting company performance and disappointing her stakeholders and demonstrated Avanade’s values in action.

Choosing courage over comfort puts us in a vulnerable position because we will likely take heat and make mistakes as we venture into uncertain territory. But this vulnerability opens the doors for others to be vulnerable too. If we face our fears and mess up sometimes, we allow people to see our humanity and invite them to share theirs too.

Practice caring transparency.

McKinsey has reported that more than three-quarters of the C-suite executives they surveyed expect the typical employee to be back in the office at some point for three or more days a week. At the same time, nearly three-quarters of the 5,000 employees surveyed indicated that they would like to work from home for two or more days per week. It’s understandable how leaders view a return to the office as a positive thing. For some, it signals an end to the chaos, a return to the known and manageable. For others, it may seem the best solution to the real experience of disconnect and fatigue that working remotely has burdened us all with.

But the disconnect in expectations and the public communication of plans that run counter to employee sentiment is a dangerous brew that can erode trust.  The answer is not for leaders to avoid strategies and plans that are unpopular but necessary; this is often the hard work of leadership. But the caring and compassionate approach is to be as transparent as possible.

Caring transparency means getting ideas and thoughts out in the open — to make visible what can often be invisible, under the surface. It means being open and honest about what is on our minds and in our hearts. We don’t hold back important information out of fear of how it will be received or how we will be viewed. By doing this, we strip away the power that comes with exclusive knowledge and level the playing field. As a result, people know where they stand and what comes next and can better plot their course in life. Transparency is distinct from candor in that you can be candid and still conceal information. When you are transparent, people know what is on your mind. And when you add caring to transparency, people also know what is in your heart.

Looking to launch a successful business but don’t know where to start? You’re not alone. Today, tens of thousands of people are considering starting their own business, and for good reasons. On average, people can expect to have two and three careers during their work life — and with the great resignation in full effect, many are looking to become their own boss or a small business owner. Those leaving one career often think about their second or third career move being one they can run out of their own home. The good news: Starting a home-based business is within the reach of almost anyone who wants to take a risk and work hard, as are a plethora of other low-cost ideas. Here are some business ideas to get you started.

1. ACCOUNTANT

Experience, training or licensing may be needed

Create a flier outlining your services. Before you do that, you need to know what those services will be. Do you want to simply do bookkeeping for a small business? A more involved level of accounting would be to work up balance sheets, income statements, and other financial reports on a monthly, quarterly, and/or annual basis, depending on the needs of the business. Other specializations can include tax accounting, a huge area of potential work.

2. BICYCLE REPAIR

n many parts of the country, this business tends to be seasonal, but you can find ways around that. Rent a storage unit and offer to store people’s bicycles over the winter after you do a tune-up and any needed repairs on them. If you want to cater to the Lance Armstrong wannabes, you can have business all year round. These road race riders are training through snow, sleet and dark of night. Some of them work on their own bicycles, but many of them don’t, so you can get their business all year. And if you keep Saturday shop hours, you can be sure you will have a group of enthusiasts coming by to talk all things cycling.

3. BOAT CLEANING

Experience, training or licensing may be needed

Boats that are hauled out of the water for the winter or even just for mid-season repairs will need the hull cleaned. And depending on the type of boat, it is a good time to give a major cleaning everything else too–the decks, the sleeping quarters, the head, and the holds. Start by approaching homes that have a boat sitting in the yard. Or you could market your services to the marina to contract you to do the boat cleaning it offers to customers.

4. BUSINESS PLAN SERVICE

Has expansion possibilities

Offer a soup-to-nuts business plan, including market research, the business plan narrative and the financial statements. Plan your fee around the main one that the client will want and offer the others as add-on services. You can give clients an electronic file and allow them to take it from there, or you can keep the business plan on file and offer the service of tweaking it whenever necessary. Have business plan samples to show clients–and make sure to include your own!

5. RIDE-SHARING DRIVER

Getting paid to drive during your free time is a great way to make extra money. It won’t likely replace a full-time paycheck but can be a lucrative extra revenue stream or side hustle. According to Nerd Wallet , here is a break down of the income you can expect: “To make an annual income of $50,000, the average Uber driver needs to provide 60.21 rides each week, while those working for Lyft need to give 83.76 rides a week, and Sidecar drivers would have had to provide 72.03 rides in a week.”

In many organizations, it’s the season for individual and team goal-setting. Deciding on a goal is generally something we want to be a rational and evidence-based exercise, combining a careful consideration of possibilities, resources, and obstacles with just the right amount of stretch. But what do you do when you feel like you have a very limited sense of what’s possible? When new obstacles seem to pop up around every corner and the sands are always shifting? When the idea of stretch seems laughable given how stressed and overwhelmed most of us are?

Setting goals in times of uncertainty and burnout can feel pointless, but it isn’t. Research shows that to engage our motivational systems and direct our brain’s energy to the right actions (both consciously and below our awareness), we need to have a clear sense of where we are, where we’re going, and whether we’re closing the gap between the two at the right rate. Without goals, we make bad choices and miss opportunities to act. But just as important, we can’t feel effective, which many psychologists believe is the most powerful source of life satisfaction and well-being humans have.

To set goals that make sense and motivate ourselves and others in such strange and often discouraging times, we need to set them with a growth mindset. And by that I don’t mean just “believe you can improve” or any of the other common oversimplifications of growth mindset. Having a growth mindset is a bit more nuanced (and more powerful) than simply believing that improvement is possible.

Your mindset is what you believe to be the larger meaning or purpose behind the work you do every day. A growth mindset is about believing that developing and making progress is the point of what you’re doing. As I’ve said before, it’s about getting better as opposed to just being good. And it’s about engaging in specific growth mindset strategies and habits to help keep you focused on the potential for growth in everything you do.

When you approach goal-setting through the lens of a growth mindset, you become more comfortable with uncertainty and more willing to entertain the idea of longer-term goals. Here are two strategies to help you get there that you can use for yourself or with your team.

Use growth-mindset trigger words to frame your goals.

When researchers want to study the effects of a growth mindset, one of the ways we do this is to describe the goal or task that someone is about to perform using certain words that evoke the idea of getting better rather than being good: improve, develop, over time, progress, become, and of course, grow.

These words serve as both explicit and implicit “primes” to your thinking. In other words, they shift the very meaning of the goal to being about developing, and they shift your mindset along with it. To use them, start by writing out your goal the way you would normally think about it. For example, your goal might be to “be an effective communicator” or to “increase sales by 5%.”

Then, rewrite it again using one or more growth mindset triggers. “Be an effective communicator” is now “become an effective communicator,” and “increase sales by 5%” is “develop our network of leads to improveour sales by 5%.”

This way of framing your goals isn’t about lowering the bar or being okay with poor performance. In fact, research shows that people who approach their goals with a growth mindset set more challenging stretch goals for themselves, not less. For example, in one study of medical supplies salespersons, researchers found that those who approached their work with a stronger growth mindset set more ambitious sales targets, put in more effort, engaged in more territory and account planning, and ultimately sold more units.

Establish progress and pivot points.

In such uncertain times, it’s important to explicitly establish progress and pivot points on a timeline right at the outset, so you can monitor both your rate of progress and the need to shift in light of new information along the way.

It can be all too easy to lose track of your goals, or to not think much about them until you get closer to the time you expected to reach them. When that happens, you may fail to adjust when progress is slow, or cling to a goal you should have revised when resources or customer expectations started shifting. For example, you may set a goal for yourself of developing a specific skill or reaching a particular sales target by year’s end. To succeed, what should you accomplish in the first month? At six months? If you don’t know, you won’t be able to course correct and, if necessary, try a different strategy or set a revised goal to have the impact you want to see for yourself or your team.

By using these two strategies to prepare for and engage in your goal-setting conversations, as a leader or a team member, you start out with a firm growth mindset foundation that you can then sustain as you pursue your goals through uncertainty, setbacks, and challenges of all kinds — something we all need now more than ever before.

By now, most of us have come across a version of the meme that poses the question: “Couldn’t that meeting have been an email?” Meetings get a bad rap, one-on-one meetings included. But they don’t have to be cumbersome or a waste of time and energy. They can actually be … great.

First, keep the objective of the meeting in mind. Your team members’ main objective is to get the necessary support to do a great job. This includes your help prioritizing issues and unblocking them if they are stuck. It is ultimately “their time,” and team members should “own” the one-on-one meeting to ensure they cover all of the necessary subject matter.

The best one-on-one meetings feel like a great conversation rather than a report-out. This means following your team member and guiding the conversation as a form of coaching. This means listening with an open mind, asking high-impact questions and giving thoughtful feedback as appropriate. Many managers don’t spend nearly enough time listening and can even monopolize the time by talking in place of their employees. They can miss critical data this was and also miss opportunities to find deeper solutions embedded in the employees’ narrative.

Tips for a successful one-on-one

The one-on-one conversation should be informed by a thoughtful, loosely held agenda. Encourage your team member to own the agenda that includes a prepared set of materials; this helps to guide the conversation. An agenda should include the following:

• Updates that can’t be found within a company dashboard or data tracker
• Support needed from the manager and other members of the leadership team
• Questions the team member has about particular issues
• Feedback the team member would like to receive

Request that your direct report send key information ahead of time so that as a manager, you can be prepared and come ready with questions or discussion points.

A brief check-in at the top of the meeting can help team members communicate how they are feeling about their role/job responsibilities and what it’s like to be in their position. According to TLNT.com, “Checking-in is an intentional practice for a team to open a meeting or session. Each participant shares what (mindset) they are bringing to the table before the work conversation starts … When everyone can remove their personal distractions, it’s easier to focus on getting the job done. A mindset check-in is about the status of your mind, not that of the project.”

However, it’s important to remember not to process this too much. Let it be their experience unless part of the check-in needs some specific support. The goal is to establish the check-in as a safe space and encourage more and more candor. Of course, there may be critical and obvious things to follow up on, and you can always ask if they need support with any specifics mentioned.

Your role as a manager is to help your direct reports learn, build capacity and execute. Part of the job is helping them learn to prioritize and problem-solve on their own; this creates capacity for you! It also gives them the gift of learning they can take for the rest of their career. In fact, I’ve heard many employees highlight managers who have supported them as being some of the biggest influences on their life. This is effectively coaching; managers should listen deeply and intentionally to a team member’s concerns, ask questions and offer clear feedback.

Although the team member owns both the meeting and the recap, managers should take their own notes to track developmental points; these can be used for bi-annual development conversations or performance management reviews. When a manager takes meeting notes in a one-on-one, it shows they value the team member with whom they are meeting.

But what might this look like in practice? Here are five ideas to consider, each grounded in research from Kellogg faculty.

Tackle the hard stuff first

When you’ve got a lot on your plate, it can be tempting to check off a few of the easier items on your to-do list first. And then, maybe, just a few more easy ones.

“You feel like you’re making more progress,” says Maryam Kouchaki, whose research has found that people gravitate toward simpler tasks when struggling with a heavy workload.

She and her colleagues found, for instance, that when ER physicians were given a choice about which patients to treat, they were more likely to choose an easier patient when they already had a lot of patients under their care.

However, the strategy doesn’t pay off in the long run. Over a six-year period, physicians who’d taken a trickier caseload learned to become more efficient than those who’d treated an easier caseload. “Physicians who are picking up difficult patients are the ones who learn over time, and they generate more value for the hospital,” Kouchaki says.

Because avoiding hard tasks indefinitely cuts off opportunities to improve one’s skills, Kouchaki suggests breaking more difficult projects into bite-sized pieces. That way, you still get the satisfaction of ticking items off your to-do list—but also the growth of tackling the tougher stuff.

Plan around end-of-day fatigue

Food-safety inspectors use a rigorous process to identify health violations at restaurants, schools, hospital cafeterias, and other places where foods are handed. Still, inspectors are only human, and the quality of their work can vary somewhat.

Specifically, Maria Ibanez and a colleague have found that inspections that occur later in the day result in fewer violations. Each subsequent hour an inspector conducts inspections during the day results in 3.7 percent fewer citations per inspection that day, likely due to fatigue. In addition, if inspectors begin an inspection at a time that would mean they would not finish before their normal quitting time, they finish the inspection 4 percent more quickly than usual—and catch 5 percent fewer violations. The researchers also found that the order in which the inspections occurred could also affect their quality. For instance, after an inspection that yielded a particularly high number of violations, inspectors were likelier to spot extra violations at the next joint, too.

“At the end of the day, being busy may not equal being productive.”

—

Jan Van Mieghem

The takeaway here is clear: it’s worth asking yourself (and perhaps measuring) whether certain sequences of tasks or times of day change the quality of your work. “That gives us an opportunity to improve performance by being smarter about scheduling,” says Ibanez.

Multitask smarter

So quality of work can be affected by scheduling—but what about efficiency?

A study from two Kellogg School professors—Nicola Persico and Rob Bray—tested this idea by altering the way Italian appellate labor court judges schedule court hearings.

The courts, which handle cases having to do with firings and pensions, are notoriously slow, and it takes multiple hearings to resolve a case. So judges typically put each new hearing at the end of the queue, finding the first open slot in the calendar and filling it. They also wait until the conclusion of the current hearing to schedule a new one.

But Persico, Bray, and their collaborators worked with six appellate labor court judges in Rome to implement a new scheduling method over a three-year period. Specifically, they scheduled hearings in advance and grouped them close together. This allowed a case to move through the system quickly once it reached its first hearing because it was unaffected by what happened with other cases.

This new method cut the time it took to resolve a case by 140 days, or 19 percent, relative to judges who used the traditional method.

While this exact approach to juggling tasks may not translate to other activities—or even other judicial hearings—the overall idea is that a lot of workers could probably get more efficient by focusing on completing a few tasks rather than simply pushing forward on many.

“All sorts of workers schedule their workflow ineffectively, in the sense that they tend to jump from one task to another too frequently,” Persico said. “They spread themselves thin, and then they achieve less than they would if they worked on something until completion.”

There are costs to collaboration

Collaboration is often described as unilaterally good—but it’s important to remember that there are costs associated with it, too.

Jan Van Mieghem and Itai Gurvich, both professors of operations management, showed in a theoretical paper that when skilled workers are engaged in concurrent collaboration—when they are all needed to execute a single task—the throughput of the entire system can suffer. This need to synchronize while coordinating can lead to a productivity loss, and workflow can slow down even further than would be predicted by the usual bottlenecks in the system.

These costs show up in real-world situations, too. A study conducted by Van Mieghem, Gurvich, and then-PhD student Lu Wang found that the productivity of one type of physician, known as a “hospitalist,” fell dramatically when that physician was required to collaborate with specialists. Collaboration had a direct effect by adding the time needed to communicate with the specialist. But it also had a “spillover” effect that ended up causing the hospitalist to spend an extra 20 percent of time on the patient’s medical chart.

Twenty-five percent of this spillover came from the increased time it took to document the conclusions of a valuable consultation. But forty-five percent came from work sequencing, or the effect of interruptions by collaborators that necessitates the hospitalist to change their workflow—switching from one chart to another, say.

“Being busy may increase interruptions,” says Van Mieghem. “At the end of the day, being busy may not equal being productive.”

In our work as career-development experts, we help people develop the skills to succeed in their increasingly “squiggly,” nonlinear careers. One skill that both managers and individuals frequently identify as a priority area for improvement is feedback — how to ask for it, how to give and receive it, and how to establish the principles and practices to make feedback a habit that helps people grow.

The flow of feedback is important for everyone, but all too often, it ends up feeling forced, formal, and infrequent. As a result, people’s development stalls and team growth is stifled. We’ve identified these five common feedback flaws:

1. Focus: Very few organizations or teams have a shared understanding of what feedback is and why it matters. When individuals apply their own interpretations, this typically leads to inconsistency and misunderstandings about both the purpose and practice of feedback.
2. Formality: When feedback is tied to formal reviews and requires filling out forms, it feels like a box-checking exercise triggered by quarterly or annual HR processes. Giving and getting feedback becomes something people feel they must do instead of something they find helpful and want to do.
3. Fear: Fears about feedback prevent conversations from getting started and insight being actioned. Concerns about having difficult conversations can lead managers to water down their feedback communication and deliver unclear messaging. And worries about what people think results in employees avoiding asking for (and being able to act on) the insight.
4. Frequency: The day-to-day demands on managers are overwhelming, leading to many missed opportunities for real-time feedback. Feedback therefore becomes an extra task to be remembered and often gets deprioritized during busy times.
5. Framing: When feedback is ad hoc and disconnected from people’s priorities, it can feel too generic to be useful or meaningful. Employees are left to connect the dots to their development, which runs the risk that they won’t be able to effectively act on the insight.

To overcome these challenges, managers can take the lead on creating a shared understanding of what feedback is for, increasing the speed and ease of feedback, and unlocking difficult conversations through the art of asking. Here’s how to create a culture of fearless and frequent feedback.

Create a shared understanding about feedback.

If the goal is for feedback to become part of a team’s culture, everyone needs a shared understanding of what it is and why it matters. Without this, managers may struggle to create the commitment needed for feedback to become a regular feature of people’s work.

We aren’t proposing a universal definition of feedback for everyone to use. Instead, we recommend managers involve their teams in creating a memorable description of feedback that feels fit for purpose for the team. Questions to prompt a discussion could include:

• What does feedback mean to you?
• When feedback is effective, how does it feel?
• When does feedback feel forced?

From these discussions, you can gain insight to inform your shared team definition. Here are some definitions we’ve seen teams come up with:

• Actionable insight
• Data for your development
• Perspectives to help people be at their best
• Information that enables improvement
• Ideas to help us to grow

Increase ease and speed of delivering feedback.

Managers can kickstart a new approach to feedback by making it quicker and easier for people to give insights to each other. Here are a few approaches we’ve seen teams implement successfully:

Idea 1: “Brilliant because…”

Praise is an easy place for people to start with feedback, but it rarely provides enough insight for people to action. Feedback becomes significantly more useful when the person delivering it includes more detail to support the recipient’s development. This can be as simple as managers encouraging team members to expand on moments of praise by adding “because” to their response. For example, consider the difference between “I thought that was brilliant” and “I thought that was brilliant because you stayed so calm and composed when someone challenged what you were presenting.”

Idea 2: “Idea-for-improvement” questions

Reframing critical feedback as ideas to improve can reduce people’s fear about sharing what they think. Once a month, managers can open up this conversation by asking their teams for feedback using an “idea-for-improvement” question, such as:

• What’s one way I could help you do your job even better?
• What’s one change we could make to improve our team’s ways of working?
• What’s one thing that frustrates you that you think we should change?

These questions can be added into existing meeting agendas so they become part of everyday ways of working.

Idea 3: “Challenge-and-build” meetings

These meetings are an opportunity for anyone on a team to receive feedback on an idea or project they’re working on. Employees share a summary of an idea and invite people to attend a challenge-and-build meeting about it. These meetings give individuals the opportunity — and the permission — to practice feedback and share their perspective in a way that feels safe, with the emphasis on a project or idea rather than a person. Questions could include:

• What do you like the best about this idea?
• Why could this idea fail?
• How might our competitors approach solving this problem?

Improve the art of asking.

Many people associate feedback with difficult conversations, which means that even the word “feedback” is wrapped up in fear. Managers can reduce that fear by focusing on asking rather than telling, particularly in difficult discussions about people’s development.

When managers start by asking rather than telling, it transforms the dynamic of difficult conversations. These questions might sound like:

• How do you think that meeting went?
• What is your experience of working with that person?
• I know you’re working on your presentation skills. How are you progressing?

By asking first, managers can then adapt their approach depending on the recipient’s level of self-awareness. Feedback follow-up questions that can help someone move from awareness to action could include:

• What could you learn from someone who you see do that well?
• Where’s a comfortable place you could develop that skill?
• What could you do differently next time?

Business leaders are constantly searching for ways to build highly effective teams that can deliver results in a rapidly changing business landscape. I’ve searched high and low, drawing inspiration from philosophy, history and literature. However, I’ve found the deep tradition of leadership established in the U.S. military, and specifically the Navy SEALs’ code of conduct, to be particularly helpful.

The SEAL code is a set of guiding principles that embody the warrior ethos of the Navy SEALs. It is a code of conduct that all SEALs are expected to live by, both on and off the battlefield. The code is based on a set of core values that are central to the SEAL ethos, including loyalty, honor, courage, discipline, respect and excellence.

These values are not just ideals or aspirations but a way of life that SEALs are expected to live and uphold at all times. They are the foundation of the SEAL ethos and are critical to the success of SEAL teams in achieving their missions.

Business leaders can learn a great deal from the SEAL code and apply its principles to develop highly effective teams in mid-sized organizations. Here are some ways that business leaders can utilize the SEAL code to build strong, cohesive and high-performing teams:

1. Build a culture of trust and loyalty

The SEAL code emphasizes the importance of loyalty to country, team and mission. This same sense of loyalty and commitment can be applied to business teams, where employees are expected to put the needs of the company and the team above their interests.

Business leaders can build a culture of trust and loyalty by fostering open communication, encouraging collaboration and creating a shared sense of purpose and mission. When employees feel that they are part of a team that is working towards a common goal, they are more likely to feel a sense of commitment to the team and the company.

2. Encourage excellence in all things

The SEAL code emphasizes the importance of striving for excellence in all aspects of life. This same emphasis on excellence can be applied to business teams, where employees are expected to continuously improve and strive for better results.

Business leaders can encourage excellence in all things by setting high standards for performance, providing opportunities for training and development and recognizing and rewarding employees who demonstrate excellence in their work. When employees feel that they are part of a team that values and rewards excellence, they are more likely to strive for it themselves.

3. Foster a culture of discipline and self-control

The SEAL code emphasizes the importance of maintaining a high level of discipline and self-control, both in training and in everyday life. This same discipline and self-control can be applied to business teams, where employees are expected to stay focused, on track and deliver results.

Business leaders can foster a culture of discipline and self-control by setting clear expectations for behavior and performance, providing regular feedback and coaching, and holding employees accountable for their actions. When employees feel that they are part of a team that values discipline and self-control, they are more likely to adopt these same values in their own work.

4. Encourage courage in the face of fear

The SEAL code emphasizes the importance of demonstrating courage in the face of fear and acting decisively and confidently even when faced with uncertainty. This same courage can be applied to business teams, where employees are expected to take risks, make tough decisions, and navigate uncertain terrain.

Meeting etiquette is key to good business, as face-time allows for clear communication and effective decision making. But all too often, meetings run longer than they should and fail to keep attendees engaged.

Whether you’re meeting with partners, vendors or employees, showcase your boardroom brilliance with these meeting musts.

Determine the objective. A clear goal will set the tone for the meeting and determine its direction. Your goal should be specific and measurable. If you’re expecting attendees to brainstorm, ask each participant to arrive with a list of ideas.

Ask yourself if a meeting is actually necessary. Meetings can be expensive. To calculate the precise cost, multiply the hourly wage of each person present by the length of the gathering. If your objective can be met through e-mail, conference call, Skype, or even a quick one-on-one discussion, skip the meeting altogether.

Invite decision-makers. The most effective meetings involve stakeholders to ensure decisions can be made immediately. If a key decision-maker is unavailable, ask a subordinate to attend. Ideally, this person will be able to speak for their supervisor, and–at the very least–take notes and report back.

Stand up. Routine meetings designed to touch base with employees and discuss status reports can usually be accomplished in 15 minutes or less. You’ll be more likely to keep the meeting short and to the point if everyone remains standing.

Schedule strategically. If you want each meeting participant to be fully engaged, avoid Monday mornings, when everyone is catching up on e-mail. Also avoid Friday afternoons, when employees are busy wrapping up the week and looking forward to the weekend. Schedule meetings on a day and time when participants are most likely to engage.

Set a time limit and stick to it. Meetings that drag on for hours cause attendees to lose patience and focus. Attention spans are short, and time is valuable. The most productive meetings start on time and end on time. 

Prioritize the agenda. Don’t leave the most important topics for last. To ensure that the highest priority objectives are met, discuss the most pertinent issues first. That way, if someone needs to step away or leave the meeting early, you’ll still have accomplished your main goals.

Stick to the agenda. The agenda is an outline–a framework–to keep everyone on topic and to maintain the meeting’s flow. The agenda should be kept to one page and should not include anything other than main topics of conversation. Sidebar conversations waste valuable time. If participants insist on talking out of turn, step in and suggest that they talk after the meeting or schedule a separate discussion. Then segue immediately back to the topic at hand.

But it’s not due to lack of effort. While company leaders will talk about what’s important to them in the coming business cycle, the message often gets lost because it lacks a clear framework that succinctly says what’s important. This can leave individuals and teams feeling lost or confused about their company’s goals and the impact of their work.

A recent poll found only 28% feel fully connected to their company’s purpose. Let’s fix that.

The OKR framework provides a structure for setting high-level Objectives and subsequent Key Results that leaders expect their organization will meet. Once leaders have set clear expectations, business units can use that information to create their own OKRs, followed by teams and even individuals.

During this event we’ll discuss how OKRs are being used in businesses across the globe. We’ll also share some good – and not so good – examples that will help you understand how this framework can help your entire workforce align their actions with company-wide goals, even during turbulent times.

Join Entrepreneur for a free webinar called How to Increase Alignment and Productivity with the OKR Framework, presented by Oracle NetSuite and Entrepreneur. Leading the discussion will be moderator Terry Rice. He will be joined by Arthur Wittman, a Content Director at NetSuite.

Register Now

Successful leaders can fall into the trap of thinking they know what’s best for their team or organization. After all, they worked hard to get where they are and have made many tough decisions along the way. However, some leaders rely too heavily on their ability to make decisions on their own — with steep consequences for themselves, their team, and the organization.

Mike, the chief technology officer of a fintech organization and one of Luis’s clients, was facing a dilemma of his own making. He found himself questioning his direct reports — “Why is it so hard for you to follow through? Can’t you get anything right?” — and barking out orders to his peers — “I’m the CTO, right? Stay in your lane; I’ll decide what to do.”

Mike, a former military officer, seasoned professional, and ex-CEO, had joined the organization via an acquisition. Early on, it was evident that there was a clash of personalities and cultures on his team and among his peers. He was used to making all the decisions and demanded loyalty and execution. Once, he made a decision that his team knew was not going to work but had them implement it anyway. His decision cost the company a considerable amount of money. It also prompted the CEO to address Mike’s overconfidence and leadership style. As he discussed the engagement with Luis, he said, “Mike is a liability to this organization and needs to be dealt with.”

When leaders who are used to calling all the shots start working with peers and stakeholders who are as successful, hungry, and confident as they are, they sometimes find themselves at odds. Their previously successful decisive, command-and-control-leadership style is no longer a viable option. And unless they pivot their decision-making style and reposition themselves as open-minded, collaborative leaders, they might be putting their future success on the line. Thus, the overconfident, decisive leader must go through a mindset change.

Gallup research estimates that the cost of poor leadership and lost productivity can tally up to $1.2 trillion dollars per year due to disengaged employees. In organizations, decisiveness, confidence, and the ability to take and carry out bold action are highly rewarded — and can lead to costly mistakes. Of the variables that impact decision-making, overconfidence can be the hardest to improve, as it “is built so deeply into the structure of the mind that you couldn’t change it without changing many other things,” as Nobel prize–winning psychologist, economist, and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, puts it.

If you’re a leader who struggles to let go of control over decision-making, here are several ways to make the mindset and behavioral changes required to become more collaborative.

First, determine why you make decisions in isolation.

If you’re an overconfident, dogmatic leader who tends to make unilateral decisions and expect your team and peers to see them through, you first need to understand why that is. Here are some questions to ask yourself to examine your decision-making style:

Do you think decision-making is a simple gut reaction?

You have many years of experience, so your gut reaction or initial judgment may often be right. But making the correct decision is a complex process that several factors can influence. One big reason people don’t make the right decision is that they don’t have all the information they need due to a lack of input. Many decisions aren’t black and white. They require input, data, expertise, and diverse perspectives from team members and stakeholders.

Do you think other people’s opinions don’t matter?

When leaders make decisions in silos and don’t seek alignment, they signal to other stakeholders, “I don’t value your opinion.” Every individual wants to feel valued, recognized, and relevant. When leaders make decisions in a vacuum, they’re not providing any of those. However, including others in crucial decision-making can increase buy-in and accountability as the decision moves to the execution stage. It also showcases a leader’s confidence in the team, strengthens relationships, and fosters a collaborative culture.

Do you believe you own decision-making rights?

Some leaders feel that their title and position give them the right to make decisions alone. They want to be in control and rely on hierarchy and authority rather than their leadership capabilities. They must recognize their authority and power are not absolute. In fact, position leadership — where a person’s leadership power comes solely through the position they hold in the organization — is the most basic level of leadership, and staying there limits their potential.

Do you believe only you can make the right decision?

Confidence is a valued skill that is closely linked to professional success. However, confidence can become detrimental when a leader overestimates their ability, knowledge, or judgment. Perhaps they’ve fallen into the expertise trap and are more likely to “jump the gun” and take on more risk than necessary due to their perceived decision-making abilities.

Second, determine how you want to reposition yourself as a leader.

Moving from being a lone wolf to a more strategic, collaborative, and inclusive decision-maker requires you to make behavioral changes in order to influence how others perceive you. If you want to be known as an influential leader, you must encourage your team’s engagement, collaboration, and accountability for collective goals and decisions. Here are some ways to get started:

Cultivate humility.

Being humble means acknowledging you don’t know everything, and that’s OK. So, always ask yourself, What is the objective? You must reframe what success means for you. Success is not having the final word or getting your way — it’s accomplishing your business objectives. And that requires having a team that’s engaged and inspired.

Be thorough.

Abraham Maslow, a psychologist and creator of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, said: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

What do you do when a high-priority project doesn’t go as planned?

Whether your team fails to deliver on its sales targets, your latest high-visibility product launch is riddled with glitches, or your marquee product faces a recall, you as a leader have a responsibility to respond to problems as they arise. 

One common instinct is to put your regular responsibilities on the back burner, roll up your sleeves, and immerse yourself in operational details. You may begin to question your team members and double-check their work as if it were your own.

This natural impulse to take control and try to fix what’s broken may seem like sound leadership. But it can lead to more problems than it fixes, says Colonel Fred Maddox, an assistant professor at the U.S. Army War College and Chief of Staff of the Army senior fellow at the Kellogg School.

“When leaders act like they’re the only ones who can solve something, it can become an issue for the whole organization,” Maddox says, “because they’re not focused on strategy and they’re doing someone else’s job.”

Leaders who interfere also signal to their teams that their input is not desired—and may not be considered—which erodes motivation. Instead of taking over, leaders should show restraint and consider how their actions and decisions impact the broader company. 

Maddox explains how to refrain from trying to solve your team’s problems alone—and free your team to grow into their own roles.

Let Go of Being a Hero

The responsibility of senior leaders in any organization is to focus on the bigger picture and not be mired in tactical processes. In a crisis, though, many leaders—and especially leaders who have risen through the ranks—can feel the urge to step into the breach. It’s here where leaders may think they are solving a problem. 

“As soon as you take over any part of execution, you’ve stepped out of your strategic role,” Maddox says. “Your skills, time, and attention are focused on tasks which are other people’s jobs, so you’re misallocating resources.” 

If your sales team loses two major clients in a week, your gut may tell you to get on the horn and try to lure them back. But appointing a senior staff member who understands your sales team’s priorities, and who has the skills to manage and communicate upwards, will free up your attention to focus on how the loss of clients impacts other parts of the business.

Even worse, if you insist on doing everything yourself, you are taking away opportunities for your team to prove that they are capable of doing the job.

“When you’re in a position of authority, it’s your responsibility to extend trust to the individuals on your team,” Maddox says. 

Acting like you are the sole person who can fix a problem disregards their knowledge and expertise. Maddox warns that it won’t be long before your team’s culture deteriorates if you step in too often to “fix” problems. 

Trust Your Team

Instead, if you constantly feel the impulse to intervene in a crisis, it is helpful to put on the brakes and reflect on why you might be overreaching.

“In the back of your head, you’re either afraid your team is going to fail, you think that someone’s not capable of handling the responsibility you gave them, or you haven’t created accountability,” Maddox says. 

Consider what you can do differently to prepare your team (and yourself) for these moments so that you can feel confident in your team’s ability to execute.

Maddox points to the military’s practice of ongoing training and simulations as a model to prepare teams for the unexpected. Though most companies would not have the resources to replicate this kind of preparation, leaders can accomplish the same goal by creating safe opportunities for teams to learn and share hard lessons. He encourages leaders to establish frequent opportunities for team members to practice new skills, supported by candid feedback. 

Every position has its responsibilities and boundaries, but leaders should always be attuned to ways their team members can weigh in and find innovative solutions. This can mean relinquishing authority to provide team members autonomy to make decisions and learn.

For example, when introducing a new skill to a team member, leaders shouldn’t rush to give instructions, but first ask how the individual would approach it, to encourage problem-solving. The goal, Maddox says, is to train team members to “walk in autonomy.”

He also advises that teams adopt a post-exercise “action review” in which participants discuss what worked and went wrong at every step of an operation. Each team member contributes so that successes and shortcomings are evaluated from multiple perspectives. 

When learning and feedback are integrated into team culture, employees are primed to take more ownership when difficult issues surface. As a result, you will no longer feel the onus to fix something which could be better addressed as a team. 

“They have the opportunity to build their confidence and skill sets in tasks that will allow them to eventually take some of the weight and burden off of you.” 

Avoid Confirmation Bias

Effective leadership awareness is about more than resisting the urge to do everything yourself in a crisis. It also means thinking critically by acknowledging the limits of your ability to gain first-hand knowledge about the crisis in the first place.

“In situations with a high degree of complexity, you are going to be reliant on others to gather more information to make the best decision possible,” he says. 

To do this, you need “multiple sensors” or viewpoints from your team members to get the full picture. “Have you considered all the variables at play?” Maddox says. “Because there’s usually more to the situation than is presenting itself in hand. Relying on others gives you the opportunity to see components that may change your decision.”

Maddox points out that leaders often are surrounded by talented staff—and may even trust those staff to react capably in a crisis—but still fail to listen to them when the information does not confirm their prior views. “We’re more attuned to listening to input that supports our decision,” he explains. “But when a person dissents, it’s harder for us to hear it and take the necessary steps to consider it, contemplate, and move forward.” 

Maddox had to confront his own confirmation bias when developing a reporting tool for his senior leaders on a division-wide initiative. He saw what he thought was a great opportunity to build a data dashboard for his colonels and generals.

“I’m thinking this is the best thing since sliced bread,” Maddox says. 

Maddox begins distributing the dashboard. His team populates it with new data every Friday. He thinks he is seeing the benefits. “In my head, this is working,” he says. 

Several weeks after the launch, he finally solicits feedback from two of the dashboard’s recipients. The first commander Maddox reached didn’t know what the dashboard was. The second commander he contacted told him it wasn’t his cup of tea, so he didn’t look at it either.

“I was so convinced it was a great tool that was so necessary,” Maddox says. “But weeks later, I learned we had created something that no one was using. That was painful, because we lost a lot of sleep putting it together.” 

To prevent confirmation bias from seeping into decisions, Maddox encourages leaders to “walk through” scenarios with team members from all angles, paying extra attention to viewpoints that contradict or challenge their own. It’s quite possible that, had Maddox listened to more voices before designing the dashboard, he would have discovered that senior leaders already had effective ways of learning this information.

“There are very few situations where the person at the top of the chain can see everything completely,” Maddox says.

Improvements in labor productivity have been the engine of U.S. economic power and prosperity since World War II. But in the past 15 years, productivity growth has faltered averaging just 1.4% annually, compared to long-term rates of 2.2% since 1948.

These small differences add up: If the United States can get back to the long-term trend, it could be worth $10 trillion in cumulative GDP by 2030. And the benefits of productivity would help the country meet longer-term challenges like the looming national debt, underfunded entitlement programs, and the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Companies have a starring role to play in this putative productivity miracle. Our research found striking variations in productivity among leading and lagging firms within each sector. Manufacturing provides a particularly stark example, where leading firms operate at 5.4 times the productivity of laggards. Academic researchers have documented similar trends in services, particularly information and communications, which show wide disparities between leading firms and the rest.

Not only are productivity disparities within sectors quite wide — they’re also getting wider. Our research shows that in manufacturing, the gap was 25% wider in 2019 than it was in 1989. Some analysts suggest this growing gap is the result of accelerated growth among leading firms coexisting with stagnation among the rest. That’s encouraging: It suggests that if those in the rear can match the leaders, the United States could restore productivity growth to historical levels.

These productivity gaps also suggest that firms can raise their own ambitions. Doing more with less, or doing more with the same, shows up in corporate income statements as higher margins and stronger revenue growth. And in aggregate, those performance improvements lead to economy-wide changes in productivity.

Lessons from the Most Productive Firms

For business leaders looking to unlock performance, there’s something to be learned by observing the companies at the top of the productivity heap. These frontier firms are usually larger than others (though not always, as we discuss below). They are present across most sectors and geographies.

What they have in common is a playbook with the following four elements:

They capture value from digitization. 

From 1989 to 2019, our research finds a strong correlation between sectors’ productivity growth and their level of digitization. Other researchers have found a similar connection between firm productivity and digitization; frontier firms are better able to technologically innovate than their peers.

However, many firms investing in technology are not seeing its benefits. McKinsey research finds that firms typically realize only about 25% to 30% of the expected value of their digital transformations. Much of the shortfall comes from not properly updating the firm’s strategy and business model to take advantage of new digital strengths.

Frontier firms set bold business goals enabled by technology. They reconfigure their organizations to digitize their operations and capture the benefits of technology, rather than augment existing ways of working. And they drive accountability for results across the organization.

They invest in intangibles.

Frontier firms go beyond technology investments and also place bets on complementary intangibles such as R&D, intellectual property, and the capabilities of their workforce. Our research finds that frontier firms invest 2.6x more in intangibles compared to other firms.

For many of these firms, taking a long-term perspective is critical. These investments likely create a productivity J-curve, in which the early benefits of investments are small, but compound rapidly over time to create outsized long-term value.

They build a future-ready workforce. 

Frontier firms also disproportionately secure the skilled talent they need to get the most out of technology, either by attracting top talent or by an in-house investment in employee skills.

Both frontline talent and tech-savvy executives are necessary to successfully navigate the reconfiguration of complex firms. Leaders are winning the talent war by recognizing the value of employee experience, investing in on-the-job training programs, and expanding policies that make it easier for parents and aging workers alike to stay in the labor force.

They adopt a systems approach. 

Frontier companies are typically system thinkers, looking for opportunities to access new markets or collaborate creatively with stakeholders.

High-performing firms tend to be more connected to global value chains, giving them access to global markets, ideas, and talent. They collaborate with suppliers and customers to form new ecosystems that benefit from agglomeration effects and create shared pools of value. They also look for opportunities to collaborate more closely with their public-sector counterparts to solve for challenges in skilled talent and physical infrastructure.

America’s New Productivity Champions

The opportunity to apply these lessons is wide open to firms of all sizes and shapes. Many frontier firms are part of what we call the Titanium Economy — small, often privately held industrial-technology companies that are among the fastest growing and most profitable enterprises in the country. These companies are often based in smaller cities, sometimes even in rural areas, and present across a variety of sectors.

Take Dot Foods, a foodservice distributor based in Mount Sterling, Illinois, population 2,006. For Dot, everything starts with the employee. “Our volume is off the charts and we can’t staff it… we’re typically 500 employees short,” CEO Joe Tracy told us.

To attract workers, Dot rewrote its shift schedules in ways that give employees more flexibility to take time off. The company invested in automation to do the jobs that no one wants to do, like slinging cases in the freezer on the night shift. It embraced technology throughout the operation and invested time in teaching workers the skills needed to operate the equipment. It worked to integrate logistics with advanced analytics, so that customers receive the products they want as fast as possible. And it acquired ShopHero to give its customers a customized, locally branded e-commerce platform replete with video and photos. Dot Foods is now the nation’s largest foodservice distributor, delivering more than 125,000 products from 1,000 suppliers to all 50 states.

Dot’s growth story is typical of Titanium Economy companies — and the opportunity for others to join them is vast. Recent data indicates that small and medium-size companies are less productive on average than large firms. But in some sectors where niche products or services can be offered at higher price points, small companies can be as productive as their bigger rivals. These data should give plenty of encouragement to business leaders looking to drive improvements in their business.

Neither size nor sector is the full measure of a company’s destiny. To be sure, grocery store owners cannot snap their fingers and suddenly enjoy the profit margins of software makers. But almost all firms can increase their productivity to approximate that of the frontier firms.

Autonomy is a hallmark of an innovative culture. The ability to make decisions for yourself enhances motivation, which turn contributes to higher levels of performance and well-being. It also gives leaders more time to focus on the most significant and complex decisions and explore new sources of value creation. Creating more autonomy involves shifting power from the top and center of the organization to the front line by empowering people to make decisions.

It might look straightforward. In practice, it’s hard to pull off. It’s a big change for executives who have “grown up” in traditional, hierarchical organizations, in which decision-making authority is held tightly by a select few and many decisions are left unspoken.

As a result, employees aren’t accustomed to making decisions. And when they are empowered to take on more decision-making responsibility, they’re often left to figure it out themselves without clear guidance or support. Even the most capable and enthusiastic employees wonder whether they’re doing the right thing. This can feel risky, especially when they see some of their coworkers being laid off; they worry about the consequences if things go wrong.

This gap between the desire for more empowerment and capability (with confidence) is what I call the “decision deficit.” Left unaddressed, employees become frustrated that the promise of greater empowerment and autonomy isn’t followed up with actions and don’t see the opportunity to develop themselves. Leaders also feel frustrated with the lack of progress.

Here are five strategies that can help you reduce this decision deficit.

Prepare yourself to empower others.

Empowerment is a management term that consistently fails to live up to its promise, in large part because executives find it difficult to give up control. They see their role and status as tightly linked to their decision-making authority. Delegating responsibility is seen as a diminution of their power. While they might appear confident and assured, underneath they may feel insecure and lack sufficient trust in others.

Prepare yourself to delegate decisions by:

• Reflecting on what has held you back from empowering people in the past. Was it a failure when you tried? What could you have done differently to make it a success? What were your feelings when you delegated, and what can you learn from them? What will it take to make the first step?
• Planning for a staggered transition of responsibilities, starting with giving low-risk decisions to capable people. This helps build up confidence in yourself and others before you distribute responsibility more widely.
• Considering it an opportunity to increase the quality of your decision-making and to explore other aspects of your role, such as innovation and growth, as you free yourself from some of your managerial responsibilities.
• Reminding yourself why you’re doing this — which should be to give people an opportunity to develop and harness their (often greater) insight into the product, service, or market in question.

One of my clients, John,* had to re-examine his own leadership style before he was ready to take these steps. He ran a tightly managed business unit, in which he made all of the calls. But his management style — fed by his underlying insecurities about whether he was good enough — was hampering the team’s ability to innovate and meet their ambitious growth targets. Working with one of his direct reports, he identified the employees he could trust the most with some of his decisions, which marked the beginning of his empowerment journey.

Develop a set of decision principles.

Your role as the leader is to encourage your people to think for themselves — not to enact a set of rules for them. Encourage them to consider what is in customers’ and the organization’s best interests when making decisions. Establish bounds for return and risk. Highlight potential behaviors that might derail sound decision-making (for example, tiredness, myopia, or overconfidence). Insist on transparency so they’re able to communicate not only the decision, but the reasoning, as required.

These principles determine the questions any decision-maker should be able answer as they prepare to make a decision:

• The decision: Capture and classify the problem that needs to be addressed and the decision that needs to be made.
• Materiality: Why does it matter?
• Timeframe: When is the decision is required by?
• Alternatives: What are the other options? Can you examine from a different perspective?
• Evidence: What do you know from direct experience and insights from analytics?
• Beliefs: What do you need to believe or assume?
• Biases: How have you mitigated potential biases, such as confirmation bias or overconfidence?
• Criteria: How will you assess the decision?
• Stakeholders: Who should be involved in making the decision?
• Judgement: What have you decided?
• Communication: How will you summarize and communicate the decision?
• Review: What lessons can this decision teach you about future ones?

Clarify decision-making roles.

It’s essential to clarify decision roles, rights, and accountability. This starts at the top. Write down the decisions you’re responsible for, individually and collectively. Consider whether you’re the best person to make these decisions while remembering that you still have overall responsibility — delegation shouldn’t be confused with dereliction of duties.

Whether or not to delegate a decision depends on your role, your (and others’) capabilities, the materiality of the decision, and the expectations of others. The more complex and sensitive the decision, the more likely it is that you’ll retain the decision-making role. For example, one of my clients, Keith Underwood, COO and CFO of The Guardian, said that he won’t delegate when “the decision involves a sophisticated view of the context the organization is operating in, has profound implications on the business, and when stakeholders [e.g., employees, investors] expect me to have complete ownership of the decision.” Kelly Devine, president of Mastercard UK and Ireland, told me, “The only time I really feel it’s hard to delegate is when the decision is in a highly pressurized, contentious, or consequential situation, and I simply don’t want someone on my team to be carrying that burden alone.”

Identify who you can give more decision-making responsibility to, based on both their capabilities and area of responsibility, and define the scope of what they can make decisions about. Over time, encourage them to cascade their responsibility downward once both of you are confident the new system is working.

For example, the CFO and the president of a division might make the key decisions in a large commercial negotiation, consulting specialists in legal or procurement as required. Then, the business unit leader or product manager can make pricing or resourcing decisions for specific products. Similarly, the person dealing directly with customers can decide how best to respond to customer complaints.

In unfamiliar, high-stakes situations, it can be difficult to remain calm and open-minded. Our instinctive reaction is to stick with what has worked for us in the past. That’s normal, and it can work well in familiar situations. But defaulting to old habits in new situations that call for new solutions is usually a recipe for failure. The challenge is that new, high-pressure situations often create a level of anxiety that triggers the very reactions that tend to limit us, stifling innovation. This is the adaptability paradox: When we most need to learn, change, and adapt, we are most likely to react with old approaches that aren’t suited to our new situation, leading to poorer decisions and ineffective solutions.

Navigating periods of turbulence successfully requires leaders to adopt a sophisticated form of self-mastery that we call Deliberate Calm. “Deliberate” refers to the awareness that you have a choice in how you experience and respond to a situation. “Calm” refers to rationally considering how best to respond, without being governed by old habits.

“Deliberate Calm” is a solution to the adaptability paradox. It enables leaders to act with intention, creativity, and objectivity, even in the most challenging circumstances, and it helps us to learn and adapt to novel challenges when the stakes are highest. The practice of Deliberate Calm — and it is a practice — changes our relationship with uncertainty.

Deliberate Calm in practice

Here’s a hypothetical example. Jeff is a sales director at a consumer goods manufacturing company facing technological and market disruptions as well as slow sales. When his boss calls with a warning that his numbers need to improve, he feels pressure, frustration, and anxiety. He responds in the style that has worked for him in the past, telling her, “I’ll fix it.” He tells himself he just needs to redouble his efforts and pull out all the stops to sell more. Except it’s possible that his new reality can’t be fixed with old approaches, and that they’ll keep him in this tough spot. What if the carrots-and-sticks method that was successful in the past doesn’t work? In this situation, setting new sales goals, building in more incentives and consequences for performance, and telling his team to work harder and do better is likely to fail or backfire. And when pushing harder in the old ways continues to fail, this is when panic can set in, triggering Jeff to pull the same levers even harder, rather than adapting to a new reality and discovering new solutions.

If Jeff were to practice Deliberate Calm, he would take a deep breath, take stock of his situation, and discuss it candidly with his boss. He would admit that he doesn’t have all the answers, that the traditional approaches aren’t working, and that he sees signs that the competitive landscape will make it harder to maintain sales. He may still feel anxious, but he’d accept that retreating to the false security of old methods is a form of denial that provides only a brief respite. He’s better off surfacing underlying concerns, managing through his own discomfort, and opening a dialogue about exploring new approaches.  He can also advocate for ways to find new responses and ask for help in developing new ideas.

Next, he should think about how to approach his sales team. In this hypothetical scenario, Jeff’s traditional carrots-and-sticks method will fail, because fundamentally new approaches are needed to solve novel challenges. Instead, he needs to explore the situation, invite new ideas, and admit he doesn’t have all the answers. The team might feel stress, but Jeff can provide some hope and optimism — along with some clear-eyed realism about the situation. He can invite his team to help discover new solutions in a way that promotes creativity and learning without fear of punishment, rather than reactive “more of the same” tactics that are showing diminishing returns. There are no guarantees, but this response is far more likely to result in new solutions and successful outcomes in the face of uncertainty.

Does the practice of Deliberate Calm actually work? Yes. We designed a Deliberate Calm leadership program for a global pharmaceutical company that put 1,450 leaders through weekly practice sessions for approximately 30 minutes per week for 12 weeks, and then measured changes in their behavior and their performance (including self-assessments and assessments by their boss, teammates, and other colleagues). The results were striking. Compared to a control group (those who were asked to try to improve the same behaviors and outcomes, but who did not participate in the program), participants in the capability program showed three times more improvement in the targeted behaviors and outcomes, including overall leadership performance, adaptation to unplanned circumstances, optimism, relational effectiveness (e.g., empathy, compassion), collaboration and teaming (e.g., fostering psychological safety), and the acquisition of new knowledge and skills. Additionally, their sense of well-being improved 7.5 times more than that of the control group. Open-ended comments from the participants suggested that they experienced as much benefit in their personal lives as they did at work.

Three skills to develop to become more adaptable

How can you start? There are three major elements to cultivating Deliberate Calm:

Learning agility

is about learning from experience, experimenting with new tactics, approaching new situations with a growth mindset, seeking and learning from feedback, and applying these lessons in real time to new situations. The principle is that leaders need to be learners even in the most challenging circumstances. It is difficult to overestimate how important this is: One meta-analysis of dozens of empirical studies found that adaptability and learning agility were the top predictors of a leader’s performance and potential.

You can build this muscle by, for example, setting your intention each day for how you want to show up for challenging situations. This may sound something like: “Instead of trying to have an answer ready for all difficult, unexpected challenges today, I will approach them with curiosity and an open mind, inviting multiple perspectives.” Doing this helps you remain open to feedback, learn, and adjust your response that otherwise may have been an unhelpful default reaction.

Emotional self-regulation

is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions, and to channel those emotions into productive ways of thinking and acting. Research has consistently shown that leaders with greater emotional self-regulation perform significantly better, as do their teams. Before you can regulate your emotional responses, you first need to become aware of what triggers them and what these responses tell you, because they can provide very valuable information.

Try to keep a diary for a couple of days, writing down moments where you feel emotionally triggered, and describe your thoughts, bodily sensations, and actions in that situation. After a week, you will have a number of these entries, and you can start to see a pattern. The more you do this, the easier it becomes to be aware in the midst of an emotional response. That’s when you can start regulating, learning not only to process the unhelpful emotions but also to become comfortable with the discomfort they bring.

Dual awareness

is the integration of internal circumstances (experiences, thoughts, emotions, and responses) and external ones (an objective reading of the situation and what it calls for). We are integrating two important things — the awareness of our own emotions, assumptions, and reactive habits, especially under pressure, and the nature of the situation we are facing. By taking a moment to take stock of ourselves and the situation, we better understand not only our true motivations and intentions, but also what the situation calls for, and how our habits and tendencies will serve us in this moment. This makes it possible to observe yourself while in action — and then match your responses to the demands of the moment.

After I noticed this, I started paying attention to people I know who are not so successful at getting what they want. And, sure enough, they were not good at recovering quickly from disappointments. They spent time beating themselves up, blaming others or circumstances, thinking about all they lost or could lose, or asking, “Why did this happen to me?” They let the problem turn into self-doubt.

Great athletes know that they can’t waste time like that. A pro golfer makes a bad shot and has just a few minutes to pull themselves together as they walk to their ball so that their next shot isn’t as bad or even worse.

A pitcher who throws a bad pitch but doesn’t have time to moan and groan about it. They must bounce back within seconds and prepare to throw the next pitch. In a sport like volleyball or pickleball, an athlete has just split seconds to recover and receive what’s coming at them.

Don’t just shake it off

A friend of mine trained in Aikido years ago. She had to take a test to earn her black belt, and part of the test was a “randori, ” meaning three other students would attack freestyle all at once. Yikes! Of course, she was taught strategies to handle this, but she told me that a big part of her training was learning to recover instantly whenever she made a mistake. If she didn’t, the next attacker would come in and nail her!

But the idea was not to just “shake it off.” She said, “If you made a bad throw, the key was to dig deeper at that moment, to call up even more energy and more determination, to let that mistake bring in even more power.”

Successful entrepreneurs don’t just “shake it off” and move on. Like the Aikido example, they use that mistake or setback to get stronger and smarter. They spend the time they have learning from the problem. Then they take those lessons learned and apply them. Focusing on the lessons versus the problem leads to more self-confidence rather than more self-doubt. You’re reinforcing that you can learn and improve and that you’ll know how to handle this situation better because you now have a new tool or more wisdom in your toolbox.

Money likes speed

In business, you’ve typically got more time than a split second to recover from a problem, and there isn’t some guy in the wings waiting to nail you if you blow a presentation or lose an important client. Usually, you have hours, if not days, to figure out what to do next.

Unlike a racket ball player or being in a randori, you usually have time to think it through before your next play. Still, successful people don’t waste a lot of time. They recover very quickly, whether they have to or not. One of my mentors always told me, “Money likes speed.”

This isn’t to say that you can’t rant and rave for a few minutes. In fact, if I let myself have a few minutes of feeling totally angry or upset, it helps clear the air and my head. But I don’t let myself stay there. I move as quickly as I can to figure out the lesson this problem offers me. Then I’ve trained myself to ask two questions: “Okay, so how will this make me stronger and better? And what is my best response right now?”

The startup world is in disarray as I write this, and the economic outlook is not great. Many companies are performing mass layoffs, scaling back on initiatives and rethinking their entire approach to sales and marketing. It won’t always be this way — it’s a cycle — but that doesn’t make it much easier while you’re going through it. The big question every marketer seems to have is, “What can we do?”

Start with these five startup marketing moves. They make a great foundation for any marketing strategy, even in the best of times, but they’re particularly prudent in the worst. Implement these, and when the cycle comes back around, you just may find yourself head and shoulders above your competitors.

1. Talk to your customers!

When in doubt, talk to your customers. What are they going through, what do they need, and what do they anticipate happening over the next three, six, 12 months? What’s troubling them may be news to you, and what’s troubling you may not matter to them at all. Here are a few questions to get the conversation going:

• How are things now compared to this time a year ago?
• Are you looking to spend more, less or about the same in this area?
• What’s your biggest challenge right now?
• What do you think the biggest challenge will be in six months? 12?
• What would make you buy this thing or upgrade your account?
• What would keep you from spending money on this?
• What are we doing that you particularly like? That you don’t?

Use these customer interviews to shape your marketing.

2. Create frictionless buying experiences

The best customer experiences remove everything that stands in the way between the customer and making a purchase. “Frictionless” is always a good target, but uncertain times like these are when you need to look for over-the-top ways to remove friction.

A few ideas to get your gears turning:

• Build a migration tool that enables customers to switch their data from competitors to you.
• Offer something incredible for free or at a massive discount to get people in the door — your lowest tier plan, onboarding, shipping, a managed service, etc. Hubspot did this incredibly well during the Covid-19 pandemic.
• Show the product or pricing, and put the control in the buyer’s hands.
• Do the work for customers — create templates, packages, widgets or something similar that they would normally have to invest time and energy into.

Through this, you can turn a nasty landscape into a great opportunity for both you and your customers.

3. Communicate clearly and consistently

The companies that are present are the ones that are remembered. This is especially true in times of uncertainty, volatility and crisis. The caveat is that you cannot simply repeat what everyone else is saying. You must lead.

Take a stance on a topic, flesh out your positioning and messaging, and communicate it. If there’s so much volatility that you don’t yet know what your position is or don’t have the data to make a decision, share that. Bring people into the loop. Become the go-to brand or thought leader. Getting all eyes on you creates significant leverage for your sales and marketing.

4. Bet bigger where you can

A knee-jerk reaction in uncertain times is to cut back, but think about it: All of your competitors are cutting back. This is the perfect time to double down on what’s working. You can increase the gap between yourself and your competitors. Then whenever the cycle rights itself, you’ll be so far ahead with so much momentum, no one will be able to catch you.

You still need to be responsible with your resources. If you can invest actual dollars into projects and channels that are already working or that you know your customers need, great. If you don’t have the money, invest your time.

Ask leaders how they will respond to a crisis or a massive new opportunity, and they often will tell you they already know what to do. This is surprising because most crises and opportunities have unexpected elements. A high-powered executive whom we coach once told us, “In any crisis, I come out of the gate fast and take action. I go over, under, or through any wall in my way. With my people, I lead from the front.” To be sure, that approach has the benefit of decisiveness, but it offers a narrow path, especially in high-stakes situations. What happens when such leaders run into obstacles they can’t muscle their way through?

Another leader we coached had a different approach. He was an incredible delegator with legendary calm. This worked well until a crisis surfaced and his team started feeling lost and overwhelmed. He stayed steady, confident in his default style, telling people, “Don’t worry, I have confidence that you’ll figure it out.” They didn’t figure it out, team members began fighting with one another, and within months the company lost its market-leading position.

In our work coaching and advising senior leaders, we have found that when faced with unfamiliar or risky situations, leaders often rely on their familiar playbook. They act instinctively, falling back on behavior and postures that worked for them before. But should their operating environment experience a discontinuity, reflexes—which may still be right at times—can no longer be counted on. To be effective, leaders need to rise above their default reactions and generate more options for how to act in the very moments when they are needed most.

Few leadership roles come with a treasure map showing a direct line to where X marks the spot. That’s why the ability to generate multiple pathways to a desired destination is crucial to success. Whether it’s chasing a strategy that could drive 10x growth in a business, facing a potentially catastrophic threat, or guiding a team through uncharted territory, great leaders generate options so that when an opportunity arises or a crisis hits, they can pivot in real time and make the optimal move.

Our experience shows that leaders’ success depends on their ability to MOVE—that is, to be mindfully alert to priorities, to generate options so that they always have several ways to win, to validate their own vantage point, and to engage with stakeholders to ensure that they are along for the ride. (We lay out this framework in our book, Real-Time Leadership.To gauge your ability to MOVE, take our self-assessment at RealTimeLeadershipInstitute.com.) In this article, we examine the crucial second step of our model. Specifically, we look at four common leadership approaches and the scenarios in which each can be most helpful, and we introduce a process for navigating the options in real time.

The Four Stances

Dozens of research studies spearheaded by American psychologists Charles “Rick” Snyder and Shane J. Lopez demonstrate how people’s capacity to reach their desired goals can be increased by conceiving multiple possible pathways. Most people assume that success at a task is a question of perseverance or willpower. But Snyder and Lopez show that willpower must be coupled with “way power” to drive successful outcomes. Their research suggests that ideally you will have four or more options or pathways for achieving your goals (external priorities). It also demonstrates the importance of determining who you want to be as a leader in terms of your character strengths and values (internal priorities) and how you can best relate to others (interpersonal priorities).

Building on this work, we have developed an approach, called the “four stances,” to help leaders generate options for interpersonal communication. Think how tennis players nearly instantly shift their stance to make an optimal response to a ball hurtling over the net. The core concept for our approach is rooted in evolutionary psychology and how our basic reflexes (fight, flight, and so on) automatically deploy under dangerous or novel circumstances. In the more evolved world of leadership, the four stances help leaders identify and access more interpersonal options. The stances are:

• Lean In. Take an active stance on resolving an issue. Actions in this stance include deciding, directing, guiding, challenging, and confronting.
• Lean Back. Take an analytical stance to observe, collect, and understand data. Actions include analyzing, asking questions, and possibly delaying decisions.
• Lean With. Take a collaborative stance, focusing on caring and connecting. Actions include empathizing, encouraging, and coaching.
• Don’t Lean. Whereas a Lean Back posture involves observing and analyzing, Don’t Lean is about being still and disciplining yourself to create space for a new solution to bubble up from your subconscious. This stance also serves to calm you if your emotions have been triggered. Actions include contemplating, visualizing, and settling through diaphragmatic breathing.

To win in any leadership moment, great leaders need to develop and be able to access all four stances. To illustrate, let’s consider one of our clients, Isobel, a newly appointed president of a major business line at a tech company.

Isobel was in trouble and called us in. She was at loggerheads with the firm’s mercurial CEO, who had a tendency to be unreliable—contradicting himself, changing positions, and often making promises the company couldn’t deliver on.

“I’m getting a bad reputation for being aggressive at board meetings,” she told us at our first two-on-one coaching session. “I just tell the truth—someone needs to—but I’m the one getting dinged.”

As we talked, we identified a clear gap between her own and others’ perceptions. Leaning In—way in—was her default stance. As a former lawyer, she was a world-class debater, and her impact was far more powerful than she realized. It was clear she needed to overcome her reflexive behavior and find other viable ways to win. We described the four stances and asked her to consider alternatives to her default approach.

“But I need to be authentic,” she countered.

“Of course,” we responded, “but you can use other stances while still being true to yourself.”

We went through the stances one by one. In situations in which Lean In was the best choice, she saw that she could be more skillful by better calibrating the intensity of her remarks. If she could learn to Lean Back and not rush into conflict, she could slow down her reactions and be more strategic about when she would engage. If she applied Don’t Lean, she could take a moment to breathe, which could help her neutralize her activation by the CEO and keep a clear head. We were all surprised that asking about Lean With was what pivoted Isobel into a new way of operating. Drawing on Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson’s groundbreaking work on psychological safety, we asked, “What if your job at the board meeting was to make the CEO and directors feel safe?”

Isobel immediately embraced that approach, which appealed to her protective side. She spontaneously started thinking through the implications. Supporting the CEO would probably help him calm down and make the meetings less painful for everyone. In the Lean With stance, she could also tolerate his contradictions by understanding that his first reaction wasn’t always his final word. She decided that she would enthusiastically support his comments when they were in alignment with the executive committee’s assessment and refrain from reflexively challenging him when he veered off course, unless the board was close to a vote on that recommendation. After adopting this approach, her reputation with the board skyrocketed. She became known as a leader who made peace rather than war.

Putting the Process to Work

How can you adapt the four stances without an executive coach? We recommend a five-step process for addressing major opportunities and crises, whether they play out in the moment or over the long term. It will enable you to choose your way forward rather than being propelled by reflex.

Identify your default stance.

Rank how comfortable you are working with others in each stance. This simple exercise is often all our clients need to identify their default stance, but if there’s any doubt, reflect on feedback you’ve been given, such as a 360-degree review. You may think of yourself as a Lean With leader because you favor decisions based on consensus—but is that accurate? When you have power as a leader, people rarely tell you the truth about how you come across. Be honest with yourself. 

Reflect on high-stakes situations.

Is the stance you take under stress different from your default stance? Think back to instances when you were able to pivot in the moment if your default stance wasn’t leading to the desired result and compare those moments with times when you stubbornly stuck with a failing approach. What held you back from moving to a different option? Habit? Panic? How can you build on experiences when you’ve done well while avoiding mistakes?

Determine the optimal stance on the basis of whom you are interacting with.

Most leaders we work with are familiar with the Golden Rule of treating others as you would like to be treated. But the best leaders we have worked with employ the Platinum Rule—treating others as they would like to be treated, which may be different from what the leader would want in their shoes. Imagine an introvert suddenly interrupted by an extrovert who means to be helpful by offering a pep talk. Or, conversely, an extrovert in need of encouragement who ends up feeling ignored by an introvert whose intention is to offer the gift of space and time to think. To live by the Platinum Rule, become a keen observer of other people and yourself. Notice body language, tone of voice, eye contact, and reactions to what you do and how you move.

Make a plan.

When an interpersonal issue arises, make space in real time to figure out how to handle it. This beat in time may last only a matter of seconds, but the point is to pause and get clarity on your intention so that you can be deliberate in your reaction. How do you want to relate, right now? Recognize that your default stance will be pulling at you—but remember that you have the option to choose a different one. We all need to dial back on some stances and develop others.

Even if you aren’t in a situation where you must think on your feet, you can use the four stances to unlock options and create a plan in advance. Suppose you need to communicate a change in strategic direction to your team, such as a shift from a major cost-transformation effort toward a growth strategy. First, Lean In and come up with a list of options for how you might best get people on board. When you think you are finished, Lean Back and be even more objective. Ask yourself, “What else would align the team?” Then Lean With by consulting others about what they think the options are for you to create a trusting and positive climate in which the change will be best received. And then Don’t Lean and see if anything else pops into your mind. Put the issue on the back burner for a moment and let your subconscious go to work.

Look for signs that it’s time to pivot.

To create the impact you want, you need to be aware of any negative effects that a given stance is having on the people around you. This will be your signal that it’s time to adopt a new one. If Lean In is your default (as it is for many leaders), recognize that doing so too often—or too hard—can shut others down, especially when you are in a position of authority. In meetings, pay attention to how much you’re speaking compared with others. Automated transcription software can provide data showing whether your voice is (or is not) the dominant one in the room. Most leaders are surprised by how much they need to switch to Leaning Back or Leaning With. Focus on listening with the goal of understanding. Consciously catch yourself not only when you’re jumping into the conversation but also when you stop listening carefully and start thinking about your response. After someone has finished speaking, take three breaths before you reply.

If you get an IRS notice — official correspondence will only come through the mail — you should respond promptly with the requested documentation like bank statements or donation letters from charities.

Typically, if your taxes are under review, the IRS will first request more information by mail. For instance, more than three out of four of the agency’s tax reviews in 2021 were conducted by mail rather than in person.

You may also benefit from an audit. Over 17,000 of the 983,000 tax returns reviewed in 2021 resulted in additional refunds to Americans.

Here are the most common reasons the IRS may audit you.

Missing income

If you’re a gig worker or contractor and don’t include income from those jobs, the IRS will notice the missing income. In most cases, the agency gets copies of the 1099 forms from companies that you worked for. The IRS uses that information to compare with your return. If it doesn’t match up, that will trigger a review.

Too-high deductions

Certain deductions can be inflated, so the IRS keeps an eye on those. For example, it’s easier to overstate charitable donations because the agency doesn’t receive documentation on your contribution from the nonprofit.

But the IRS depends on statistical algorithms to determine if your deductions make sense based on your total income. If those deductions are too high, the agency may ask for documentation, such as a letter from the charity showing your contribution, to support your deduction.

Foreign accounts

You might need to report a foreign financial account — say, a bank account, brokerage, or mutual fund — when you file your federal taxes.

You must file Form 8938 if the total value of your foreign assets is more than $50,000) for single taxpayers or those married filing jointly) or $100,000 for joint filers on the last day of the tax year. You also must file if the total value of your foreign assets is more than $75,000 for single taxpayers or those married filing jointly) or $150,000 (for joint filers) at any point during the tax year, according to the IRS.

High earners

Those who make more than $1 million are more likely to get audited by the IRS.

For example, the IRS reviewed 0.2% of all individual tax returns for tax year 2019. That rate tripled to 0.6% for taxpayers reporting $1 million to under $5 million, 1.0% for taxpayers reporting $5 million to under $10 million, and 2.0% for taxpayers reporting $10 million and more in income.

Child dependent

Only one person can claim a child as a dependent, even if the parents don’t file taxes together. This can be even more complicated if another adult, such as a grandparent or older sibling, also helps support the child.

Today’s macroeconomic environment is marked by high inflation, low consumer confidence, abysmal stock market performance and rising interest rates. Few sectors of the economy are exempt from the current malaise, and discretionary spending by consumers and businesses alike is at an all-time low.

In times like these, it’s natural for entrepreneurs to focus on surviving rather than thriving. But recessions can actually be fertile ground for companies that are prepared to seize opportunity. Here are four ways entrepreneurs can take advantage of a recession to achieve massive growth:

1. Look for white space in the market

In a recession, many companies trim their product lines and focus on their core offerings. This creates opportunities for companies that are able to identify and fill gaps in the market.

For instance, in September, Facebook shuttered Novi, its digital wallet. The move comes as no surprise. Facebook is facing big challenges in maintaining both user and investor confidence amidst a slowdown in growth, all while its metaverse dreams flounder. But the death of Novi opens up an opportunity for a new entrant to provide a digital wallet. In fact, a phoenix has already risen from the ashes: A Web3 wallet, Martian, raised a $3 million pre-seed following Facebook’s announcement.

Just as Novi aimed to provide a simple way to store digital currencies and make payments, Martian is said to “allow users to hold, store, and use multiple digital assets.” The key difference is that Martian is being built on top of open-source technology, rather than Facebook’s centralized infrastructure.

In another example from the Web3 world, the FTX exchange famously collapsed, leaving thousands of users looking for other trading solutions. Yuriy Sorokin, the CEO of 3Commas, explains in an article that, amidst this volatility, their “goal remains the same as always: to meet the needs of every crypto investor by providing industry-leading services and professional-grade tools.”

Rather than suffer from an industry downturn, Sorokin found an opportunity to double down. These kinds of opportunities are everywhere in a recession. As incumbent companies focus on their core offerings, new entrants can swoop in and provide the missing piece of the puzzle. In another example, while Ford is reducing the production of its trucks and SUVs, Tesla is gearing up to mass produce its Cybertruck.

2. Attract top talent

From Google to Facebook to Uber, many of the most successful tech companies have announced layoffs this year. While this is devastating news for the employees who are impacted, it’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs who are looking to attract top talent.

In a recession, it’s not just big companies that are making layoffs. Small businesses are cutting back as well. But as employees at all levels find themselves out of work, they’ll be looking for opportunities that offer both security and upside potential. For entrepreneurs, this presents a golden opportunity to attract the best and the brightest to their team.

Some recruiters have already started to take advantage of the current climate. As Reuters reports, following layoffs at Google and Apple, Stack Overflow more than doubled its headcount. Stack Overflow isn’t alone, as a survey of startup tech executives found that more than 40% of them boosted their hiring plans in the first half of 2022.

If you’re an entrepreneur, now is the time to start thinking about how you can attract top talent to your company.

Gregg Berhalter coached the U.S. men’s soccer team in the 2022 FIFA World Cup, where they achieved a memorable victory over Iran before losing to the Netherlands. Berhalter, who was a professional soccer player himself for 17 years, has coached in Europe and the U.S., and for the past four years, he’s been the head coach of the U.S. national team.

In the past couple of weeks, he’s been under another kind of spotlight. Berhalter’s decision to limit the playing time of one of his young players prompted the player’s parents to threaten to expose an incident from more than three decades ago in which Berhalter got into a physical fight with his girlfriend at the time, who later become his wife. Berhalter and his wife issued a statement in which he expressed his regret for his action at the time and his cooperation with a U.S. Soccer investigation into the matter.

Berhalter sat down with HBR editor in chief Adi Ignatius for our video series “The New World of Work.” In addition to the controversy, he discussed:

• Leadership lessons he’s learned through coaching teams of highly competitive individuals who may not be used to working together and who are vying for limited starting positions.
• How players can stay focused amidst the noise and distractions that come with playing sports at such a high level. (It starts by not looking for validation on social media.)
• The differences between talent and character—and how to capitalize on both.

“The New World of Work” explores how top-tier executives see the future and how their companies are trying to set themselves up for success. Each week, Ignatius talks to a top leader on LinkedIn Live — previous interviews included Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi. He also shares an inside look at these conversations —and solicits questions for future discussions — in a newsletter just for HBR subscribers. If you’re a subscriber, you can sign up here.

ADI IGNATIUS:

I’m really glad you’re doing this. I want to start with the controversy. What are you feeling about this? What have you learned from all of this?

GREGG BERHALTER:

I think it’s sadness. Our entire family is saddened by these events. It’s something we want to move forward from. As we said in the statement, it was something that we didn’t hide from back then, and we weren’t prepared to hide from it now, and that’s why we issued this statement. Actually, the events of that night 31 years ago and the lessons learned from that basically set the foundation for our relationship moving forward. It’s a loving relationship, a devoted relationship, and we have four amazing kids to show for.

I think the worst part of it for me is my heart aches for my wife, because it was her story to tell, if she chose to or not. It just really, really saddens me. But it’s moving forward and that’s the way we have to look at it together as a family. The family’s been amazing and has taken it one day at a time and moving forward.

A big reason for doing this show is because I committed to doing it. We committed to doing this before all this stuff happened and I wasn’t going to back down from it, because I said I would do it.

Several years ago, I traveled from New York to Geneva, Switzerland to be the closing keynote speaker for the World Communication Forum. I was excited to have the opportunity to speak with global leaders about how nonnative English speakers can present their ideas — and themselves — with greater clarity and confidence. For my allotted 45-minute time slot, I prepared high-quality research, relatable examples, actionable takeaways from my book on the topic, and ample opportunities for audience engagement.

But then, the conference ran late. Every single presentation and panel prior to mine exceeded its time limit. By the time my closing speaking slot arrived, I had only eight minutes to deliver my 45-minute presentation — a presentation I had flown across the Atlantic Ocean to give.

Here’s what I wanted to do: cry, insist on my full time, and then hop on the next plane back to New York.

Here’s what I did instead: managed my emotions, empathized with the audience’s wants and needs, and delivered an eight-minute presentation that gave them practical tips and tools that they could use immediately.

Here’s how it went: great. Participants shared their appreciation for my adaptability, focus, and my good humor, as well as their gratitude that I didn’t make them late for dinner.

In the moment, I chose servant leadership over self-interest.

The term servant leadership was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf, and refers to a leader who “shares power, puts the needs of others first, and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible.” This is in contrast to the traditional leadership model which focuses on the power of one at the “top of the pyramid.”

As public speakers, we can often feel like we’re at the top of the pyramid because we’re at the front of the room. It can be tempting to interpret a presentation as an opportunity to showcase what we know rather than address what the audience wants and needs to know. But that makes it about us, not about them. In contrast, speakers as servant leaders demonstrate self-awareness, empathy, and foresight. Here’s how you can do the same.

What makes a servant leader?

Self-awareness

As soon as I realized that I was going to have to cut almost 80% of the presentation I had been working on for months, I felt myself get flooded with both anger and anxiety. I was angry that other speakers went over their allotted time. I was anxious that I wouldn’t be able to adapt my remarks in time to make them both concise and compelling.

And I also realized that, as a visibly expressive person, I could pass that anger and anxiety on to the audience. Emotions are contagious, and leaders must recognize that their feelings can “infect” others, for better or for worse. Furthermore, the more expressive someone is, the more likely others are to notice that expression, and mimic it.

Unless I wanted an angry and anxious audience, I had to manage my emotions before taking the stage. Chances are, you’ve experienced anxiety (among a host of other emotions) before making a presentation. Leverage that self-awareness to make sure you’re not infecting your audience. One strategy is to “name it to tame it.” Originally developed by Dr. Daniel Siegel, founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, this technique involves noticing and naming how you’re feeling as it’s happening. Identifying your emotions can quickly reduce the stress and anxiety in the brain and the body that that emotion is causing.

You can also ask yourself, “WTF?” (“What the func?”). According to Dr. Susan David, co-founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital and a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, our emotions serve a function. They’re trying to get our attention, and to remind us of the needs and values that we hold as important to us. When you present, ask yourself what functions those emotions serve. Maybe you feel anxious because you care deeply about accuracy, and you don’t want to get the facts wrong. Perhaps you feel worried because you’re motivated by harmony, and you’re about to say something that could rock the boat.

And, if you’re like most people, you feel anxious speaking in front of people in general because you value excellence (“What if I don’t do a great job?”) or acceptance (“What if they don’t like my ideas?”). Harness your drive towards excellence to practice delivering your presentation aloud to a colleague, and use their feedback to improve it. If you’re concerned about acceptance, practice with a colleague who will play devil’s advocate with you. By practicing how you manage pushback and objections, you’ll gain additional insight into your audience’s concerns, and be better prepared to address them in the moment.

Whatever your hard feelings are, know that they’re pointing you towards something you value — and towards something you can use to become a more audience-centered presenter.

Empathy

If you were to ask me what the most common mistake is that presenters make, I wouldn’t say using filler words or having a boring PowerPoint or not being able to answer tough questions.

I would say that it’s leading with the ideas that they want to talk about rather than being empathetic towards the audience’s hopes and fears.

Presenting with a servant leadership approach flips this model. Rather than prioritizing your own agenda, you put the agenda of the audience ahead of yours. You seek first to understand rather than to be understood. You show curiosity, concern, and compassion for others, even if you have a different experience.

In Geneva, I wanted all 45 minutes of the stage time I was promised. But I knew that fighting for air time would be in service of me, and not in service of the needs of my fidgety, hungry listeners.

So, I prioritized their need to get the most applicable information from my presentation over my desire to tell interesting stories. I told them that I recognized that I was all that was standing between them and dinner, and that I wouldn’t make them late. And I mentioned that I knew that they had been sitting for many hours, and invited them to stand up, walk around, stretch, or do whatever they needed to do while I spoke.

Here’s an exercise you can do to help you develop the empathy you’ll need to present from a servant leadership perspective: Picture a bed — any bed. Let that bed inspire you to ask these servant leadership questions about your audience.

• What gets them out of bed in the morning? In other words, what are they excited about and motivated by? Is it growth? Opportunity? Collaboration? Innovation? That’s one clue to what you should prioritize in your presentation. If this is an internal presentation, you will likely know this because whomever you’re presenting to will have shared these goals in previous meetings, conversations, or emails. For an external audience, you can ask the person convening the meeting, or reach out to a few attendees to ask them by email or via a quick phone call.
• What keeps them up at night? What are they worried about? Is it time? Money? Quality? Headcount? Visibility? Viability? Reputation? Whatever it is, that’s your second clue to what you should prioritize in your presentation. Use the same strategies from above to find the answers to this question, too.

Once you know what’s in the heads and hearts of your audience, design your presentation to address those topics first and foremost. You’ll have your audience’s attention and buy-in because you’ve demonstrated empathy over self-concern.

Foresight

Servant-leaders leverage their experience and intuition to draw lessons from past experiences, to understand the realities of today, and to reasonably predict the consequences of a decision for the future.

Good presenters need to be able to do the same.

As someone who has been a professional speaker and speaking coach for three decades, I knew from past experiences that trying to maintain an audience’s attention, interest, and goodwill beyond the time they were expecting to stay was a losing battle. I also knew this from my experience as an audience member myself — I regularly felt tense and frustrated when I was being asked to pay attention beyond the allotted time.

The reality of that day was that several other speakers who preceded me had exceeded their time. It was now eight minutes before dinner time after a long day. Another reality was that I had 45 minutes of content, but I no longer has 45 minutes to deliver it. I could reasonably predict that if I decided to take more time than we had left, the audience would no longer pay attention. I could also anticipate that if I tried to rush through my content, the audience would feel overwhelmed and confused — and it would undermine my credibility as a speaker. My decision was to give the audience the most important content they needed to know and to get the conference back on track.

It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but my foresight (and hindsight) informed what I needed to do to be of service.

Consider your audience.

As you think about presenting to your audience, ask yourself these questions:

What do I know about their understanding of this topic?

(And if you don’t know, ask someone who does.) If your audience has minimal understanding of your topic, include some foundational education about the topic early in the presentation. Make sure to minimize jargon, in-speak, acronyms, and technical terms that can confuse your listeners. (Remember, it’s not about demonstrating what you understand — it’s about making sure they understand.) If your audience is already educated about and experienced with your topic, then start where they are.

What if you have an audience with mixed knowledge? A presentation for multiple audiences can become confusing, so consider who your primary audience is and gear your presentation towards them. And yet, you still want to be inclusive. Try acknowledging this aloud to the group by saying, “I understand that some of you are new to the field, many of you have been working in the field for a few years, and some of you have decades of experience. I’ll start by defining some basic terms and then we’re going to get into the details they understand. For those of you who are experts, I hope you’ll add your valuable experience and perspectives to the conversation today. (I do this regularly when I am speaking to a group of experts in my own field, and they appreciate being acknowledged and included.)

And that’s why communication is no longer considered a “soft skill” among the world’s top business leaders. Leaders who reach the top do not simply pay lip service to the importance of effective communication. Instead, they study the art in all its forms — writing, speaking, presenting — and constantly strive to improve on those skills.

For example, while Jeff Bezos was building Amazon, he put a premium on writing skills. In the summer of 2004, he surprised his leadership team and banned PowerPoint. He replaced slides with “narratively structured memos” that contained titles and full sentences with verbs and nouns.

Bezos is not alone among top leaders. “You cannot over-invest in communication skills — written and oral skills,” says former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, who now serves on Amazon’s board. “If you cannot simplify a message and communicate it compellingly, believe me, you cannot get the masses to follow you.”

During my research for The Bezos Blueprint, I found a number of common tactics top leaders use when communicating with their teams. Here are four to try:

1. Use short words to talk about hard things.

Long, complicated sentences make written ideas hard to understand — they’re mentally draining and demand more concentration. You’ll win more fans if you replace long words and sentences with short ones.

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do,” writes Nobel prize–winning economist Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow. He argues that persuasive speakers and writers do everything they can to reduce “cognitive strain.”

Software tools like Grammarly assess writing quality by generating a numerical readability score. The score assigns a grade level to writing samples. For example, a document written for a person with at least an eighth-grade education (the average 13-year-old in the U.S.) is considered “very easy to read.” It does not imply that your writing sounds like an eighth grader wrote it. It simply means that your sophisticated arguments are easy to grasp — and ideas that are easy to understand are more persuasive.

Since writing is a skill, you can sharpen it with practice. Bezos improved as a writer over time. His first Amazon shareholder letter in 1997 registered at a tenth-grade level (comparable to The New York Times). Over the next decade, 85% of his letters were written for an eighth- or ninth-grade level.

For example, in 2007, Bezos explained the benefits of Amazon’s newly introduced Kindle in a paragraph a seventh grader could understand:

If you come across a word you don’t recognize, you can look it up easily. You can search your books. Your margin notes and underlinings are stored on the server-side in the “cloud,” where they can’t be lost. Kindle keeps your place in each of the books you’re reading, automatically. If your eyes are tired, you can change the font size. Our vision for Kindle is every book ever printed in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.

Bezos chose short words to talk about hard things. When you make things simple, you’re not dumbing down the content. You’re outsmarting the competition.

2. Choose sticky metaphors to reinforce key concepts. 

A metaphor is a powerful tool that compares abstract ideas to familiar concepts. Metaphors bring people on a journey without ever leaving their seats. Chris Hadfield, a famous Canadian astronaut, is a talented speaker and TED Talks star who tapped into the power of metaphor to describe an indescribable event:

Six seconds before launch, suddenly, this beast starts roaring like a dragon starting to breathe fire. You’re like a little leaf in a hurricane…As those engines light, you feel like you’re in the jaws of an enormous dog that is shaking you and physically pummeling you with power.

Roaring beasts, leaves in a hurricane, the jaws of a dog — these are all concrete ideas to describe an event that few of us will ever experience.

In business, metaphors are shortcuts to communicating complex information in short, catchy phrases. Warren Buffett understands the power of metaphor. If you watch business news or follow the stock market, you’ve no doubt heard the phrase “moats and castles” attributed to companies that dominate an industry that’s difficult for competitors to enter. Buffett popularized the phrase at a 1995 Berkshire Hathaway meeting when he said, “The most important thing we do is to find a business with a wide and long-lasting moat around it, protecting a terrific economic castle with an honest lord in charge of the castle.”

The castle metaphor is a concise shortcut, a vivid explanation for a complex system of data and information that Buffett and his team use to evaluate potential investments.

When you introduce a new or abstract idea, your audience will automatically search for something familiar to help them make sense of it. Introduce a novel metaphor and beat them to the punch.

3. Humanize data to create value.

The trick to reducing cognitive load and making any data point interesting is to humanize it by placing the number in perspective. Showing them PowerPoint slides with statistics and charts only adds cognitive weight, draining their mental energy.

Any time you introduce numbers, take the extra step to make them engaging, memorable, and, ultimately, persuasive.

For example, by 2025 scientists expect humans to produce 175 zettabytes of data annually, or one trillion gigabytes. It’s simply too big a number for most people to wrap their minds around. But what if I said that if you could store 175 zettabytes of data on DVDs, the disks would circle the earth 222 times? It’s still a big number, but the description is more engaging because it paints a vivid image in your mind’s eye.

Famed astrophysicist and science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson once told me that the secret to science communication is to “embed the concept in familiar ground.” In other words, turn data into language mere humans can understand.

One of Tyson’s famous examples of humanizing data occurred in 1997 when NASA launched the Cassini space probe to explore Saturn. Skeptics questioned its $3 billion price tag, and so Tyson appeared on television talk shows to educate the public on the benefits of the mission. But first, he had to deal with the price shock, so he pulled a data comparison out of his rhetorical toolbelt. He explained that the $3 billion would be spread over eight years. He added that Americans spend more on lip balm every year than NASA would spend on the mission over that timeline.

To demonstrate the value of your idea, humanize data and make it relevant to your listeners.

“Employers are stuck in the way things used to be, where employees have moved on,” observes David Schonthal, a clinical professor of strategy at the Kellogg School and coauthor of the best-selling book The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas. 

Resisting change is human nature, Schonthal says. But too often, when leaders try to implement a new idea or roll-out changes—like return-to-office mandates—they focus primarily on their own vision for the future of work, or alternatively, on hammering out nitty-gritty details. What can get lost in this is the broader challenges of overcoming inertia and resistance.

“Forces of resistance are present anytime you’re trying to convince somebody to make change, anytime you’re trying to inspire somebody to do something new,” Schonthal explains.

Schonthal and his colleague Loran Nordgren have identified four “frictions” that can derail any change or new idea from taking hold. Schonthal says that leaders who want employees to increase office time will have more success if they address some of these frictions head on.

Acknowledge That People Don’t Like Change—or Being Told What to Do 

Most of us have “an overwhelming desire to stick with things that are familiar,” Schonthal explains. Therefore, one of the primary frictions that leaders face when trying to make a change is inertia. 

After more than two years of remote or hybrid work, employees no longer see office work as the norm. “Something that was once status quo has become a foreign concept in a short period of time,” Schonthal says. 

At the same time, the dynamics between employers and employees have shifted during the pandemic. For one, many employees now value the autonomy they have gained more than they value their in-person interactions with their colleagues. They also feel emboldened by a hot job market. 

“At this moment, there are more positions open than talented people to fill them,” Schonthal says. “While this shift in the power balance may be tenuous given current market volatility, employees’ preferences changed just when economic conditions gave them a lot more chutzpah.”

This change in dynamics is amplifying another friction, that of “reactance,” or our natural aversion to being changed—being told what to do—by others. 

“When employees feel like they are being required to come back into the office at certain times, they may view such a mandate as a frontal assault on the autonomy they gained during the height of the work-from-home era,” Schonthal says.

Seed Ideas Early and Often

But while a certain amount of inertia and reactance may be inevitable, there are things that leaders can do to ease the transition, says Schonthal.

He points out that people don’t respond well to big announcements that surprise them. On the contrary, we are more likely to accept significant changes when we’re introduced to the idea over time. So he advises that leaders seed designs about the return to office into internal communications early and often. 

“Make sure that you’re not asking somebody to commit to something the first time they hear it,” he says. “The more frequently people hear about something, the more open to it they will be when the time comes to make a decision—because they’ve had time to get used to the idea. In this way, unfamiliar new ideas have time to become more familiar to the audience.”

Effective leaders have long managed the emotions they display at work. They project optimism and confidence when team members feel thwarted and discouraged. Or notwithstanding their skepticism about the company’s strategic direction, they carry the company flag and work to rally the troops.

This emotional labor, whereby leaders manage their feelings and expressions to fulfill the expectations of their role, is substantial. In fact, research suggests that leaders perform emotional labor with a frequency matching that of front-line service workers who must consistently deliver “service with a smile.” Given leaders’ substantial influence over group moods and emotional states and how these impact organizational performance, this emotional labor is essential.

Despite its importance, however, it has historically been overlooked by academics and organizations alike. And now, due to changes in the work landscape, the emotional labor leaders must perform is greater than ever.

Leaders are expected to attend to employees’ mental and physical health and burnout (while also addressing their own), demonstrate bottomless sensitivity and compassion, and provide opportunities for flexibility and remote work — all while managing the bottom line, doing more with less, and overcoming challenges with hiring and retaining talent. They should appear authentic, but if they get too honest about their distress, others may lose confidence in their leadership, known as the “authenticity paradox.”

Without proper support, there will be significant costs to this additional burden of emotional labor. Unmanaged, it puts leaders at an increased risk of burnout and health issues. In turn, organizations risk decreases in productivity and performance and high turnover of leadership talent.

To avoid these costs, organizations must support their leaders in managing the emotional labor they perform. Here’s how:

Recognize emotional labor as labor

Leaders may quickly recognize the mental fatigue that can come from cognitive labor and the wear and tear from physically pushing through long days or sleepless nights. However, they often underestimate and neglect to directly address their role’s emotional labor.

To cope with emotional demands, leaders may “surface act” and put on a game face that belies their true feelings. Unfortunately, suppressing and faking emotions has high costs for both the leader and the organization. The effort expended reduces self-control resources, making leaders likelier to lash out at work, for example, by belittling or making rude comments to a coworker. The stress of consistent surface acting can also impact leaders’ health, making them more prone to bodily aches, burnout, insomnia, and drinking heavily when they get home.

Business schools and leadership development programs rarely prepare leaders to handle the emotional demands of their roles. So, leaders are likely unaware of the ineffectiveness and adverse outcomes of emotion suppression and surface-level acting. Recognition is the first step toward better performance and health.

To support leaders in reducing the incongruity between how they feel and what they communicate, organizations should assess the emotional culture of their organization. Recent research demonstrates that allowing employees to express their full range of emotions at work can result in better team-building, idea generation, and problem-solving. Organizations can encourage such authenticity by creating psychologically safe climates where employees trust they can share distress without being branded as weak or soft.

Promote self-compassion from the top down

Given the pervasive myth that leaders must be strong, some may be reluctant to embrace self-compassion. Many mistakenly shun the practice due to misplaced fears that it might make them complacent or undermine their success.

However, research strongly confirms that leaders who practice self-compassion have higher emotional intelligence, resilience, and integrity. In short, they are better leaders, and there’s a trickle-down effect to their teams and organizations. When leaders practice self-compassion, they treat others more compassionately. One study showed that self-compassionate leaders helped others more with task-related and personal problems. In turn, stakeholders perceive these leaders as more competent and civil. Further, leaders who show vulnerability and admit they don’t have everything figured out create a more psychologically safe context where others can feel safe to share.

Organization can support their leaders by educating them on the numerous benefits of self-compassion and encouraging them to practice being patient and understanding with themselves when they don’t handle things perfectly. When leaders trust that it’s okay to not be okay, it can help them better align their true feelings with their expressions and reduce the toll of surface acting and emotional labor.

Provide training on handling others’ emotions

When employees share their suffering or resentment at work, it can be difficult for leaders. Distress and frustration about work conditions can feel like a personal attack and create defensive reactions. Even when team members vent about non-work distress, leaders are expected to show compassion and can feel drained from the effort. Further, leaders can “catch” the team members’ distress or frustration and carry that load throughout the day, making them more likely to subsequently mistreat others.

The good news is that leaders can neutralize compassion fatigue and negative emotional contagion by learning new emotional skills, such as reframing emotions as information to be processed. By purposefully assuming the role of information seeker, leaders gain valuable information about how to lead effectively and protect themselves from the collateral damage of lending an ear. This is similar to the “compassionate detachment” that doctors learn to mitigate witnessing pain and suffering. As we illustrate in leadership workshops that we’ve conducted, this is the difference between absorbing emotional comments like a sponge versus holding them out as objects in your open palm.

Organizations can offer skills training that helps leaders build emotional capabilities so they are less drained by their emotional labor. Interventions that train mindfulness — accepting experiences and emotions rather than judging or avoiding them — reduce the need for managers to surface act and the costs of that effort. Participating in emotional skills training can also help managers feel more genuinely compassionate and demonstrate more servant leadership behaviors.

Millions of people suffer from loneliness. More than 300 million people globally don’t have a single friend, according to Gallup data. And more than 20% of people don’t have friends or family they can count on whenever they need them.

The average person spends 81,396 hours — the equivalent of more than nine years — at work. “Americans are now more likely to make friends at work than any other way — including at school, in their neighborhood, at their place of worship, or even through existing friends,” according to the Survey Center on American Life.

So, people spend a lot of their lives at work, and that’s where they’re most likely to develop friendships. Yet of everything companies do to improve employees’ lives and promote their happiness, social well-being is the aspect they invest in least, according to a Gallup survey of CHROs of the world’s largest companies. Indeed, Gallup finds that globally, only three in 10 employees strongly agree they have a best friend at work.

Why Should Companies Care?

Despite claiming “people are our greatest asset,” many executives I’ve met expect employees to leave their personal lives at the door when they come to work. Yet Gallup’s data shows that having a best friend at work is strongly linked to business outcomes, including improvements in profitability, safety, inventory control, and employee retention.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Minnesota not only confirmed that close friendships increase workplace productivity, they also found out why — friends are more committed, communicate better, and encourage each other. And according to a global study by the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), “Interpersonal [work] relationships have a sizeable and significant positive effect on the job satisfaction of the average employee. [Relationships] rank first out of…12 domains of workplace quality in terms of power to explain variation in job satisfaction.”

If increased productivity, profitability, job satisfaction, and retention aren’t enough, Gallup’s latest findings show that since the start of the pandemic, having a best friend at work has an even greater impact on important outcomes — like workers’ likelihood to recommend their workplace, intent to leave, and overall satisfaction. With the unavoidable increase in remote and hybrid work, best friends at work have become lifelines who provide crucial social connection, collaboration, and support for each other during times of change.

Unfortunately, the pandemic not only exacerbated global loneliness, it also took a toll on workplace friendships. Among people working in hybrid environments, Gallup has seen a five-point decline in those who say they have a best friend at work since 2019.

Building Lasting Friendships at Work

Whether a workplace is fully in person, fully remote, or hybrid, a culture that prioritizes and encourages work friendships is good for employees and good for the bottom line. So how can managers create and maintain a friendship-friendly workplace that delivers measurable results while also helping to combat the global epidemic of loneliness? Here are some actions to take right now:

Establish a buddy system.

Everyone needs a buddy, especially when they’re new to a company. Teaming up new hires with veteran employees can expedite onboarding and productivity. Workplace buddies not only give new hires tips like where stuff is and what the unwritten rules are, but they help them make connections with other people in the company. And some of these initial connections will almost certainly lead to long-term relationships.

The key to an effective buddy system is the frequency of the interactions. Microsoft found that when its new hires met with their buddy more than eight times in their first 90 days on the job, 97% said that their buddy helped them become productive quickly. But when new hires met with their buddy only once during the first 90 days, that number was only 56%.

Increase face time.

Before the pandemic, work was a place where colleagues could get coffee, have lunch, and run into each other in the hallway for impromptu conversations. For people who started working remotely full time in 2020, one of the biggest changes was the sharp decrease in hours they spent engaging socially with work friends.

Building friendships requires talking to, seeing, and being with people. The best way to connect is to see each other — even if it’s on Zoom or FaceTime. But at a minimum, coworkers need to talk more and email less. Email will never live up to face-to-face dialogue. Plus, it’s much easier to misinterpret what someone means over email.

Business leaders need to set an example: Communicate in person more and email less. Further, leaders can encourage in-person interactions by revising expectations, establishing new cultural norms, and even updating workplace configurations. For example, encourage cross-training or have workers rotate job duties so they can collaborate with people in other areas of the company. Exposure to new people creates opportunities to meet new friends. Plan on-site social events, meetings, or lunches. Move people’s workspaces closer together. Where else do you spend so much time with people from different walks of life organized around a common mission? And where else are you so dependent on the efforts of others?

Jam constantly.

When people share a common goal and achieve great things together, they form a connection. The joy is in working together to produce magic. Using the Beatles as an example of a high-performing team, The Economist states: “The Beatles love what they do for a living. When they are not playing music, they are talking about it or thinking about it. They do take after take of their own songs, and jam constantly.”

If you’ve ever been part of a collaborative “jam session,” you know the feeling. Your employees want to feel that too — the satisfaction and pride of creating something great while having fun. Best friends trust, accept, and forgive each other. And when they work together, Gallup research has shown that they are significantly more likely to engage customers and internal partners, get more done in less time, support a safer workplace, innovate and share ideas, and have fun on the job.

Think of great business leaders, and Henry Ford, Madame C.J. Walker, Andrew Carnegie, Estée Lauder and Steve Jobs may come to mind. Regardless of when they rose to prominence, all were not only effective leaders but visionaries and disruptors whose innovative ideas took their companies to new levels and defined their respective industries. When considering the accomplishments of luminaries who exemplify effective leadership, what I find interesting is that beyond the obvious (intelligence, discipline, work ethic), certain characteristics span culture, industries, and even time.

More than one road to leadership

First, while there are some (Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela, for example) for whom leadership was their destiny, I also believe that effective leaders are not necessarily born as such. They can be made through desire, hard work and preparation. Some are fortunate enough to access the management track early on; growth comes quickly with the guidance of mentors who provide real-world context after years of business school theory.

Others become accomplished leaders in a nonlinear fashion, leapfrogging their way up by sheer tenacity and a willingness to go wherever the opportunity presents itself and gaining essential experience and lessons along the way. Though there are multiple paths to becoming an effective leader, all roads seem to intersect at several behaviors, attitudes and characteristics that the best leaders exhibit. Moreover, many of these traits focus not on business capability but human virtues.

Effective leaders are often described as:

Generous

Effective leaders genuinely enjoy recognizing employees rather than bask alone in the spotlight. They understand the need to trust others and delegate authority, giving decision-makers room to fly. They’ll gladly share credit for a job well done and are eager to convey lessons learned and best practices honed over the years in order to pay it forward.

Relentless

Effective leaders prepare thoroughly for the decisions and duties they must undertake yet are never content with what they already know. They thirst for greater knowledge and remain open to learning new things, receptive to new ideas and methods (including how to improve their performance).

Compassionate

Effective leaders respect the bottom line yet never lose sight of the people responsible for delivering it. When leaders demonstrate active listening, employees feel they are being heard and understood and valued and respected on a personal and professional level. And when great joy or sorrow befalls one of their own, efficient leaders empathize and don’t begrudge employees the time they need to process major life events.

Exemplary

Company culture and employee behavior reflect the attitude at the top. Efficient leaders walk the talk in every way, and employees emulate those cultural cues on everything from embracing casual wear to their commitment to corporate social responsibility; feeling secure to take earned vacation in an always-busy environment without fear of being considered “not a team player”; being willing to speak truth to power without fear of retaliation: or recognizing that pursuit of the unicorn known as work/life balance may occasionally mean that a five-year-old playing dress-up is in the background on your team’s Zoom call.

We tend to have a range of reactions to the prospect of networking. Some of us love making connections and sharing information with new people. Some of us dread the awkward introductions and small talk.

And though we have probably all heard that networking is important to our career, these different attitudes mean we approach it differently. Below, our faculty discuss several social and psychological factors involved in networking—so you can assess your own approach and change it if you need to.

1. Networking’s “Ick” Factor

Maryam Kouchaki, an associate professor of management and organizations, is interested in the ick factor that many of us feel while networking. She and coauthors explored where that feeling comes from and found that networking can make people feel morally impure.

For example, in one study, participants saw partial words that could either be completed with a word related to cleanliness or an unrelated word (S _ _ P could be “soap” or “step”). They found that participants who had been asked to recall an instance of professional networking were more likely to fill in cleansing-related words than participants who had recalled forging a personal connection.

How does the aversion to networking that some people feel affect their professional careers? The researchers asked a group of lawyers about their personal-networking patterns and found that lawyers who felt dirtier after networking tended to do it less often—and had fewer billable hours.

2. How to Get Over an Aversion to Networking

Given networking’s importance to many careers, Kouchaki’s findings raises an interesting question: Can anything be done to combat this feeling of impurity? In another paper, Kouchaki and the same colleagues examined how the lens through which people view their networking can alter how they feel about it.

“We wanted to know what determines whether people feel guilty or not, and what we can do to help people get over this discomfort,” she says.

“Think about networking as an opportunity rather than a burden. That’s the biggest hurdle you need to overcome.”

— Maryam Kouchaki

Across several studies, they found that the more people viewed networking as a way of achieving a goal (as opposed to a way of preventing negative professional consequences), the less troubled by networking they felt, and the more likely they were to actually do it.

“Think about networking as an opportunity rather than a burden,” Kouchaki advises. “That’s the biggest hurdle you need to overcome.”

3. Who Else Dislikes Networking?

Kouchaki’s studies reveal one group of people with a particular aversion to networking—those who see it as a burden. But other groups have their own reasons for disliking networking.

A study by the late Ned Smith, who was an associate professor of management and organizations, looked at why seasoned professionals seem to be more comfortable actively reaching out to their networks than their more junior colleagues. After all, junior professionals often stand to gain the most from networking, so they’re doing themselves no favors if they’re networking-averse.

“We sensed this disconnect between who actually needs to be doing the networking behavior the most, and who is actually doing the networking behavior the most,” says coauthor Jiyin Cao, who earned her PhD from Kellogg and is now at Stony Brook University.

Smith and Cao explored why this is the case. First, they confirmed that higher-status people have larger networks and are more likely to work to broaden those networks. But, critically, they found that the differences between low- and high-status individuals actually hinged on something else: whether people considered status to be an indicator of quality. When people attributed their own high status to their talent and hard work, they were particularly eager to network because they were confident they had value to offer and that others would be receptive to their outreach.

“Higher-status people think, ‘I’m not just networking; I’m offering value to you,’” Cao explains. “They don’t feel like they’re taking advantage of their networking partner, which makes them come across as more authentic.”

Of course, the opposite is also true: lower-status individuals who feel they have little to offer others are less likely to network.

For those people, Cao advises to “think about the value you bring to this relationship. If you know you have value to bring to the relationship, you will feel more comfortable about doing this type of work.”

4. Status Affects How We Network

So social status affects how people generally approach networking. Another study by Smith and Leigh Thompson, a professor of management and organizations, shows that status also affects how people network when they really, really need to: when they’re at risk of losing a job.

Smith, Thompson, and coauthor Tanya Menon, at The Ohio State University, found that those who identify as having high social status tap into broader social networks when faced with the prospect of job loss than those who regard themselves as low-status individuals.

Accordingly, “If I’m a high-status person under a threat, I’ll be in a better position potentially to find the next job than a low-status person under threat,” Thompson says.

The difference does not reflect differently sized support networks. Rather, the research shows that higher-status job seekers typically reach out to a wide range of contacts, including individuals they met only occasionally in their work lives. Low-status people, by contrast, tend to share their situation with only their closest associates, such as family members and old friends.

“When people who perceive themselves as having high status face job loss, they remember the weak ties more than they otherwise would have,” Smith says. This is important because weak network ties are key sources of job-related information. “Low-status people under the same threat have exactly the opposite response; they go to dense, strong ties.”

Serena crunched all the numbers and made the best estimates possible when she was preparing the coming quarter’s sales projections for the product she managed. She used lessons from her graduate studies in statistics and decision science. Informed by historical trends, economic forecasts, and market projections, she estimated a total sales volume of 1,000 units. In addition, she estimated a 15% probability that sales would fall below 900, and a 15% probability that sales would surpass 1,100. When she finished presenting her forecast, the first comment was from the CEO; she leaned back, scowled at Serena, and said, “I don’t pay you to be uncertain.” 

Many of us, like Serena’s CEO, imagine they want perfect predictions made with absolute certainty. For people like that, the current economic moment has brought a particularly acute apprehension. The business press reports robust jobs numbers and low unemployment, but high inflation and anemic economic growth. The news is rife with speculation about whether recession looms, even while some government officials offer rosy forecasts and comforting words. It is a complex picture that leaves substantial uncertainty about the future. Should your company invest in hiring additional staff or scale back in case a recession brings a decline in sales?   

If you are looking for fool-proof strategy for obtaining certainty, we have bad news for you — the world is complicated and markets are difficult to predict. But, if you are looking for ideas to manage the uncertain future, we have good news. There are tools for thinking through uncertainty and using it to plan and make decisions. These tools are useful in everyday life and every economic climate, regardless of whether the world is at war or at peace; whether the economy is growing or shrinking; and whether we are in a bull or a bear market. Here, we share five tools for thriving in an uncertain world.  

Think in Expected Values 

The essence of rationality is selecting the course of action with the highest expected value. Computing expected value is as easy as multiplying the value by its probability. For example, the expected value of a gamble that pays $20 with 50% probability is $10. If you could play this gamble every day of your life at a cost of $9, you would come out ahead in the long run. You should take the chance every day, even though half the time you would lose $9. On losing days, you may feel sad that you got unlucky, but you need not regret your choice to play; it was a good choice, given what you knew at the time you made the choice.  

Jeff Bezos pitched early investment in Amazon.com using the logic of expected value. He saw a large potential upside of his online retail business, but also acknowledged substantial risk. He warned early investors that there was a 70% chance he would fail and their investment would become worthless. But the potential rewards attached to that 30% chance of success, he argued, was enough to outweigh the 70% chance of failure. In fact, a dollar invested in Amazon.com when the company went public in 1997 would be worth $1,840 today. Let’s say that, at the time of the IPO, there was a 70% chance of failure and a 30% chance of a return of $1,840 for a dollar’s investment. That would give a dollar’s investment an expected value of $552 (which is $1,870 multiplied by 30%). That expected value makes investment a good idea. 

The logic underlying expected values acknowledges that the future is uncertain and our decisions should reflect that. Some of the uncertainty in the world is simply irreducible. It is folly, for instance, to pretend you can predict the coin flip or the roulette wheel. Likewise, many of the social and economic systems in which we operate are sufficiently complex that it is functionally impossible to predict their operations perfectly. 

History is replete with confident forecasts from smart people that, in retrospect, look ridiculous. Take, for example, Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak’s pessimistic prediction in 1985: “the home computer may be going the way of video games, which are a dying fad. For most personal tasks…paper works just as well as a computer, and costs less.” Or consider Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich’s gloomy forecast in his 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb, that the world would run out of food and “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” in the 1970s. In a complex world, we should forecast with humility. Give up on the pretense that you can anticipate precisely what will happen. Usually, though, the answer isn’t to just shrug your shoulders and say “I have no idea what will happen.” Instead, think about the range of possibilities and the likelihoods of each. Explicitly considering how you might be wrong can help you be more humble.  

We often ask participants in our studies to report their confidence in different ways. One matches the way we are most often invited to forecast the future: They report a best guess and their confidence in it. For instance, we ask them to estimate the high temperature, one month out, in the city where they live. When asked this way, across studies, people on average claim to be about 70% confident that the actual temperature will be within 5 degrees of their guess, even though they are only right 30% of the time. 

A second way to forecast is to estimate the likelihood of each of several possibilities. For instance, I can break the range of likely temperatures into a set of ranges, each 10 degrees wide. When people estimate these likelihoods, the highest probability assigned to any 10-degree range is lower — typically a bit below 50%. Now that’s still overconfident relative to their 30% hit rate, but it’s a lot better.  

Use the Wisdom of the Crowd 

Even experts tend to have too much confidence in their estimates, and most of us have too much confidence that we can find the right expert. The Wall Street Journal asks expert economists to predict key economic outcomes for the upcoming year. There is huge variation in their predictions. How should you use the distribution of expert forecasts? Many would use the advice of the top expert. That’s basically what the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates advocated: 

First of all, ask whether there is any one of us who has knowledge of that about which we are deliberating? If there is, let us take his advice, though he be one only, and not mind the rest.

A different approach relies on the wisdom of crowds. In his 2004 book on popularizing that idea, James Surowiecki argued that simple rules of aggregating judgments within a group — including using a mean or median, or majority vote for yes/no decisions — typically outperform more complex decision-making strategies. Business professor Rick Larrick and his colleagues show the benefits of a “select-crowd” strategy, which consists of choosing a small number of expert individuals and averaging their opinions. Averaging the estimates of all of the economists in the WSJ survey is a better strategy than selecting the estimate of the best predictor from the previous year. But averaging the top five predictors from the previous year outperforms a simple average all of the economists’ opinions. 

It is our craving for certainty that leads us to chase a single expert, the one who can make perfect predictions. And this craving also makes us vulnerable to charlatans who lie to us and pretend they know; or worse yet, those megalomaniacs so overconfident that they sincerely believe they know. Beware the leader, entrepreneur, or political candidate who claims certainty about an uncertain future. They reveal more arrogance than insight. 

Calibrate Your Confidence 

Many self-help and business books could leave you with the impression that your challenge in life is to maximize your confidence. Shouldn’t you want to be optimistic? “One of the most important qualities of a good leader is optimism,” Disney CEO Robert Iger wrote in his 2019 memoir, The Ride of a Lifetime. “People are not motivated or energized by pessimists.” Our advice to accept uncertainty could make you look indecisive or, worse yet, pessimistic. Good leaders should strive for confidence, right? 

Wrong. Striving for maximum confidence can lead to all sorts of bad decisions. Overconfidence about your future earnings could lead you to spend more than you have. Overconfidence about your invincibility might lead you to take risks that could shorten your life expectancy. Overconfidence about your popularity can lead you to behave in annoying and offensive ways. Overconfidence about your success can undermine investment in the effort required to achieve it.  

Good expected value calculations require accurate estimates of both the probability and the payoff of different options. That is not easy when wishful thinking leads you to overestimate the probability of desirable outcomes. Conversely, if you are a defensive pessimist, you may be tempted to overestimate the risk of disaster, so as to motivate yourself to avoid it. Both are biases you should try to banish from your expected value calculations. You want accuracy. Once you have calculated both value and probability as faithfully as possible, then you can consider your attitude toward risk. If you are risk averse, then you will require that uncertainty be offset by higher expected values. On the other hand, risk seekers will be willing to accept lower expected values in return for the chance at a jackpot. 

Decision analyst and former professional poker player Annie Duke, in her book, Thinking in Bets, describes how gamblers help calibrate each other’s confidence by challenging implausible forecasts with the question, “Wanna bet?” This can be a fun game to play with your colleagues if you disagree about something. Instead of arguing, bet on your beliefs. Write down everyone’s forecasts and resolve the bets later. 

This can be a useful way to get better at calibrating your confidence: keep track and keep score. Get in the habit of making probabilistic forecasts of uncertain events. Then go back and see how often you were right. When you claimed 90% confidence you would meet a particular deadline, how often did you do it? If your confidence is perfectly “calibrated” you’d have met that deadline 9 out of 10 times. 

Managers can help others in their organizations get better at calibrating their confidence by collecting predictions and scoring them later. Will a development project stay on schedule? Will the project stay on budget? Record everyone’s estimates of these probabilities and then score them and publicize them later. Share the results so that people are aware of their own accuracy. Encourage those who report to you to honestly report their uncertainty. Don’t be like Serena’s boss, who, by demanding certainty, encouraged inaccurate and overconfident forecasts.   

Not very long at all, according to a new research review on “micro-breaks,” which the authors defined as a break of 10 minutes or less. The findings were published on Aug. 31 in the journal PLOS ONE. People who took breaks experienced statistically significant boosts in their wellbeing—making them feel more vigorous and less fatigued. The results, based on a review of 22 previously published studies that included 2,335 participants, indicate that those who took micro-breaks had about 60% better odds of feeling energetic, according to Patricia Albulescu and Coralia Sulea, co-authors of the study and researchers at the West University of Timisoara in Romania.

The research was less conclusive on whether micro-breaks improve work performance, however. The benefits varied from study to study and across different kinds of tasks, and ultimately the effect wasn’t statistically significant, although the researchers found that there was improvement as the breaks got longer.

However, there’s robust evidence that for your average worker with a sedentary job, little breaks can have a big impact, says John P. Trougakos, professor of organizational behavior and HR management in the department of management at University of Toronto-Scarborough, and an expert on breaks. (He was not involved in the new review.) By combining both short and long breaks into the work day, workers will feel better and produce better quality work.

Here’s what to know about micro-breaks, and how they can improve your work day.

Why micro-breaks are important

Trougakos argues that the studies in the new review miss an important factor: fatigue tends to worsen over time. Since the experiments in the 22 studies were constrained by time, it wasn’t possible to measure the ways in which being tired at work can create a vicious performance cycle.

“The more fatigued you get, the more effort you have to put in to keep performing. So you actually are expending more and more effort and doing it less and less efficiently,” says Trougakos. “Short breaks, whether it’s a 10-minute break, a 5-minute break, standing up and stretching, you’re kind of giving the person a chance to stop the depletion cycle, but also re-energize themselves a little bit.”

Overall, Trougakos says, while there hasn’t been much research on micro-breaks and performance, science suggests that short breaks are important. That includes studies with an ergonomics angle, which have found that resting your eyes and stretching is necessary to avoid eye strain and skeletal fatigue—discomforts that can distract and drain workers. Not taking sufficient breaks can also negatively affect workers’ sleep quality and life outside of work, and gradually lead them to feel burned out. Studies suggest highly productive employees tend to work in relatively short spurts, with long breaks—according to one study published by a productivity tracker company, spending 52 minutes working for every 17 minutes of break. “The idea is: you don’t work more to be more productive; you work smarter to be more productive,” Trougakos says.

The ideal breaks

The breaks you need might depend on what you’re doing; for instance, activities you enjoy might drain you less than a task you hate or that causes you a lot of stress. As a general rule, however, Trougakos recommends spending about 90 minutes working, followed by a 15- or 20-minute break. Over the course of that working period, you’d also be taking micro-breaks. Trougakos suggests a short stretch break every 20 or 30 minutes, as well as a break to “get away from the task” somewhere in the middle of those 90 minutes.

But what is the best way to rest during these short breaks? While there’s evidence that some things are good for everyone, like stretching, relaxing, or light to moderate physical activity (think: taking a walk), Trougakos says, the best break depends on an individual’s preferences. For instance, an extrovert might choose to grab a coffee with their work friends, while an introvert might duck outside with a book. The key, he says, is that you have control over what you do during your break.

To be sure, Trougakos admits that some managers and companies will be nervous about permitting their employees to take so many breaks. Flexibility is key—employees have different needs for breaks, which might vary depending on the task or even from day to day. However, in many cases, Trougakos argues that the shift to hybrid schedules and working from home has given organizations and workers a novel opportunity: to branch out and find new ways to work to maximize productivity. While permitting break flexibility might feel counterintuitive to companies, it actually fits with what most employers value: to “get people to be fully productive, but also be healthy and have a balanced life,” Trougakos says.

Take a moment to bring to mind a person who’s burned out. You’re likely picturing someone who is overbooked and overwhelmed, drowning in multiple demands and competing priorities.

But, burnout is far more nuanced than simply being busy and tired.

For years, it was believed that everyone reacted to chronic workplace stress in the same way. But research has revealed that burnout manifests itself in different ways depending on a person’s work environment as well as their internal resources, including dedication to their job and coping mechanisms.

Let’s take a closer look at the three types of burnout and how you can overcome each one.

Overload Burnout

Overload burnout occurs when you work harder and more frantically to achieve success, often to the detriment of your health and personal life. This is the type of burnout that most people are familiar with, and it’s also the most common.

Overload burnout typically affects highly dedicated employees who feel obligated to work at an unsustainable pace. As a result, they drive themselves to the point of physical and mental exhaustion.

Professionals with overload burnout tend to cope by venting their emotions to others (i.e. complaining about how tired and overwhelmed they are). This subtype is also quick to jump into problem-solving mode, creating more work and responsibility for themselves, which only exacerbates their stress.

Signs to watch out for:

• You overlook your own needs or personal life to fulfill work demands
• You invest more than is healthy in your commitment to your career or ambitions
• You endanger your well-being to achieve your goals

How to address it:

Researchers note that the way out of overload burnout is two-fold. First, it’s important to develop stronger emotion regulation skills, such as naming and processing your emotions and reframing negative self-talk. For instance, you could reframe the belief that you need to work all the time to be successful to “enjoying my life helps me become more successful.” After all, resting is not a reward for success. It’s a prerequisite for performance.

Second, it’s crucial to separate your self-worth from your work. “Consequently, by learning to keep a certain distance from work…,” researchers Jesús Montero-Marín and Javier García-Campayo write, “individuals could avoid excessive involvement and prevent burnout.”

Strive to diversify your identity — to create self-complexity — by investing in different areas of your life beyond work. You might decide to devote time to your role as a spouse, parent, or friend. During the pandemic, one of my clients restored an old identity by renewing his pilot’s license. Volunteering with the Civil Air Patrol proved to be a healthy forcing function to get away from his computer, while also contributing to his sense of well-being.

Under-Challenged Burnout

You might be surprised to find out that burnout can result from doing too little. Under-challenged burnout could be considered the opposite of the overload subtype. It occurs when you’re bored and not stimulated by your job, which leads to a lack of motivation. People with under-challenged burnout may feel underappreciated and become frustrated because their role lacks learning opportunities, room for growth, or meaningful connection with co-workers and leadership.

Workers who feel their tasks are monotonous and unfulfilling tend to lose passion and become cynical and lethargic. They cope with the stress of being under-challenged through avoidance — distraction, dissociation, or thought suppression (i.e. ordering themselves to “Stop thinking about that”).

Signs to watch out for:

• You would like to work on assignments and tasks that are more challenging
• You feel your job does not offer you opportunities to develop your abilities
• You feel that your current role is hampering your ability to advance and develop your talents

How to address it: 

When you’re demoralized, it can be hard to care about much of anything. Lower the stakes by simply exploring your curiosities. Set a goal to learn a new skill in the next 30 days to kickstart your motivation. Start small and don’t overwhelm yourself. Perhaps you spend an hour or two a week learning to code or devote 20 minutes a day practicing a new language.

Making strides towards something that feels fun and meaningful to you creates a flywheel of momentum that can lift you out of a funk. Even if the skill isn’t directly related to your job, you’ll likely find that the positive energy spills over to reinvigorate your passion for your work — or that it inspires your career to move in a new direction.

You might also try job crafting to turn the job you have into the one you want. Again, baby steps are key. Focusing on incremental changes can add up to big results. Take my client, Alice, a product management lead. As the pandemic wore on, she increasingly felt underchallenged by her role, which mostly comprised of team performance management. So, I gave her an assignment. For two weeks, she tracked what tasks created the most psychological flow. A clear pattern emerged: Talking to customers lit her up, as did solving challenging workflow problems. Alice’s manager was ecstatic when she proposed a new research project combining those skill sets to innovate the company’s core product.

Neglect burnout

The final type of burnout is the worn-out subtype. This is also called neglect burnout, because it can result from feeling helpless in the face of challenges. Neglect burnout occurs when you aren’t given enough structure, direction, or guidance in the workplace. You may find it difficult to keep up with demands or otherwise feel unable to meet expectations. Over time, this can make you feel incompetent, frustrated, and uncertain.

The worn-out worker copes through learned helplessness, which occurs when a person feels unable to find solutions to difficult situations — even when ones are available. In other words, people with learned helplessness tend to feel incapable of making any positive difference in their circumstances. In other words, when things at work don’t turn out as they should, those with neglect burnout become passive and stop trying.

Signs to watch out for:

• You stop trying when work situations don’t go as planned
• You give up in response to obstacles or setbacks you face at work
• You feel demoralized when you get up in the morning and have to face another day at work

How to address it: 

Find ways to regain a sense of agency over your role. Try creating a to-don’t list. What can you get off your plate by outsourcing, delegating, or delaying? Look for obligations you need to say “no” to all together and hone the skill of setting stronger boundaries. A great place to start is by identifying situations where you feel an intense sense of resentment. This is an emotional signal that you need to put healthier limits in place.

Likewise, consider talking to your boss about your workload. You could explain how you’re currently spending your time and ask, “Are my priorities consistent with yours? What would you like me to change?” Or, “If we could take Project A off of my plate, then I’d have more time to focus on our team’s strategic priorities and ultimately deliver on the key goals we’ve evaluated against.” Your manager will likely be thrilled you’re thinking about the big picture and taking initiative.

Most importantly, focus on what you can control. Outside of office hours, be bullish about self-care. Create routines and rituals that ground you, such as a daily walk or journaling practice. When you feel helpless about changing tides at work, some semblance of predictability is essential.

You have a vision for your career and where you’d like to end up. You may even know what to do to get there. But there’s an obstacle in the way: your current job.

For some lucky professionals, simply executing well is the path to recognition and eventual promotion to the position you want. But for many others — especially if the job you covet involves a different skillset or requires building connections with new colleagues – the intense time requirements (and brand positioning) of your current role may actually inhibit your ability to advance. Over time, this can become a serious handicap, in what Marshall Goldsmith and Sally Helgesen term“focusing on your job at the expense of your career.”

In my book The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World, I write about how to simultaneously navigate two realities: meeting the short-term needs of the moment (i.e., doing your job to pay the bills) while positioning yourself for long-term success. Here are four principles you can follow to make progress, even if you’re feeling overburdened by current expectations.

Analyze the strategic value of your activities.

In order to understand which parts of your job are most — or least — aligned with your future vision, create a Venn Diagram, with one circle representing your existing responsibilities, and another the job description you aspire to. Odds are, at least some areas will overlap.

You can use this diagram to help you identify the tasks you’d like to maintain (current tasks that will carry over and be relevant in your new role), stretch toward (ones you don’t perform now but will need to in the future), and hopefully jettison (ones that have no relevance for your desired position).

Enlist allies.

It’s rare that we have total discretion over our workload and responsibilities, so you’ll need to enlist allies — especially your manager — to help you achieve your vision. Assuming you have a good relationship, you can go to them and explain the career path you’d ultimately like to take. “I’m committed to doing a great job in this role,” you could say, “and I’d also like to position myself for success in the future. If you’re willing, I’d love your help in strategizing around how to make that work.”

Then, you can share your analysis with them and ask for their help in identifying and recommending you for stretch assignments or opportunities to help you develop new skills and contacts (for instance, sending you to an industry conference or nominating you for a cross-departmental committee so you’ll have the opportunity to make new connections). You can also raise the prospect of shifting unwanted tasks off your plate, though it may need to be done over time (and with your commitment to train others in the necessary protocols). It can also be useful to reach out to other supportive colleagues — in your department and elsewhere — as they may be aware of opportunities that your boss isn’t.

Manage your brand.

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to career advancement is having to reinvent your personal brand. It’s not (in most cases) that you’re perceived negatively. It’s simply that people can’t imagine you in a more senior role, or in a new context, because they’re used to thinking of you in a certain way and fail to question those assumptions. That’s why it’s essential – even as you’re still performing your current role — for you to start shifting the narrative.

Just as the classic advice is to “dress for the job you want,” you should also raise your level of conversation, as though you’re already in your desired position. If you want to be promoted, start asking higher-level strategic questions in team meetings. If you’re planning to shift functional areas, read up on your new domain and begin posting about it on social media, or mentioning it in conversations with colleagues.

In particular, think about shoring up perceived weaknesses that you fear may disqualify you. If you’re never worked overseas but that’s commonly required for your ideal next position, think about other ways to demonstrate aptitude, like taking language classes or taking an executive education program in the region you’ll be dealing with. You want to “prepare the terrain” so that when the idea is raised about you getting promoted or landing the position you want, the goal is for those around you to say, “Oh yeah, I could see that.”

Be willing to experiment with “120% time.”

Google (now Alphabet) famously encourages its employees to use 20% of their time on experimental activities outside the scope of their current job requirements — and that creativity has born fruit for the company, such as the creation of Google News. It’s also led to major career advancements for the employees who utilize it. In The Long Game, I profile one marketer who landed a coveted job at X, Alphabet’s “moonshot factory,” as the result of a volunteer project he undertook using 20% time.

When starting or running a business, most people will tell you that a high-quality pitch to investors or potential partners will sell your venture itself. The investors, partners and potential clients will line up if you’re skilled with language and can tell a unique, captivating story and explain financial returns. So, the story goes…

That thinking is misguided.

The most extraordinary concepts in the world won’t sell if no one knows about them. It lies on your shoulders to get out there and talk about your ideas and concepts – no matter how much they may speak for themselves. Your pitch is the power fueling the process of letting people know about your business or projects.

Most people think a pitch is something to be feared and avoided at all costs. It’s those unknown moments when the world can come crashing down on you.

The pressure to convey everything about your hard work in a few simple sentences — or in a few short minutes — can bring people to their knees (literally, as they double over with fear). It’s basically public speaking and only a rare handful like that.

The truth, however, is simple. Powerful pitching is a skill that can be learned, just as is good writing. The most significant difference is that it may take years and years to become a skilled writer, but it may only take a few hours to become powerful at pitching.

As someone involved in hundreds — if not thousands — of pitches worth millions of dollars, I know how true this is. I’ve been on both sides of pitches to (and from) the corporate world, production companies, studios, investors, and major television networks.

I used to think it was all about how polished my public speaking skills were. The real truth is that the talking piece is only one aspect of the bigger picture.

Several elements of a pitch bring great results, and it isn’t all about how well you perform during the presentation.

You may have far more control over a pitch meeting than you think

I started focusing on the other parts of pitch meetings and saw the success rate of our business increase dramatically. We now have more than 11 TV shows approved by major networks and approval from more than 50 networks worldwide to be our affiliates. For every 15 TV shows we pitch, about 11 get approved, which is far higher than the industry average.

This broader view doesn’t work in just the media industry — my insights apply to any industry, as I’ve seen repeatedly when I coach people on everything from phone accessories to artificial intelligence.

Today I want to walk through three simple ways to listen with your eyes and improve your pitches. Paying attention to any of these secrets will help you drive your big meeting closer to the direction you seek.

The complete list is a lot longer than three items, but pulling these three from my book, One Sense Ahead, is an excellent starting place to get you skipping happily out the door after a meeting.

1. Pay attention to the body language of the people in the room

Are they distracted and looking at their phone or notepad or documents? This shows they have too much on their mind, and you need to be quick and brief to get their attention. Are they slouched back in their seats, showing they’re relaxed but possibly not interested? If so, you need to have a powerful attention-getting distractor to get things rolling. Don’t immediately launch into your rehearsed pitch.

Most people are so laser-focused on getting their point across about their concept or business that they forget the simplest of all pitching ‘rules’ — think more about the other person than yourself.

2. Pay attention to how the person across the table is breathing

Yep. You read it correctly: breathing. Who cares about that as long as the person is there?! I know that’s what you’re thinking, but the reality is that people tell you a lot about themselves by the way they breathe. Are they breathing through their mouth only? Or their nose? How ridiculous is this, you ask? I can hear you screaming at the screen or thinking it loudly in your mind as you want to stop reading my words… and yet… aren’t you curious about where this goes?

I notice every detail about a person when I’m in a meeting with them, and it gives me clues on how to steer the conversation. You’re the one doing the pitch, so it’s to your advantage to be able to steer anything at all. If another person is in the “decision-making chair,” their chair matters most.

This is a challenging time for managers. Alongside their day-to-day roles, many are facing a never-ending cycle of reskilling and recruiting on their teams. The need to reskill isn’t new, with the OECD estimating that 1.1 billion jobs are liable to be radically transformed by technology in the next decade. However, managers are now being asked to close the skills gap at the same time as they’re responding to pandemic-prompted resignations.

According to Gartner, the pace of employee turnover is forecast to be 50–75% higher than companies have experienced previously, and the issue is compounded by it taking 18% longer to fill roles than pre-pandemic. Increasingly squeezed managers are spending time they don’t have searching for new recruits in an expensive and competitive market. Unless efforts are refocused on retention, managers will be unable to drive performance and affect change. Leaders need to take action to enable their managers to keep their talent while still being able to deliver on results.

From Constrained Careers to Retention Reimagined

Although managers are undoubtedly navigating dynamic market conditions, one of the primary reasons why people look to leave remains the same: a lack of career progression. That same Gartner report found that 65% of employees are now reconsidering the role of work in their lives; however, only one-third are open to internal opportunities providing part of the solution.

Limited awareness of roles and a perceived lack of support from managers means that for many, it has become easier to leave and growthan squiggle — that is, change roles and develop in different directions — and stay.

Even the most supportive managers face a tough choice in response to this challenge. Investing time and effort in their employees’ career development is often at odds with the metrics they’re measured against. Research from Mercer finds that eight out of 10 companies focus on individual goals whereas just five out of 10 work toward the goals of the broader business unit. Managers who optimize for individual performance are likely to become more territorial about their talent. By keeping the “best” people on their team, they achieve the best outcomes. However, this is often to the detriment of individuals’ career development and the organization’s ability to access its own talent. The unfortunate outcome is that the people managers most want to retain feel constrained and become more likely to leave, risking the performance metrics they were so keen to protect in the first place.

The solution to the career development conflict this creates lies in taking a fresh look at how retention is managed. Managers need help with three things. First, they need help shifting the focus of career conversations from promotion to progression and developing in different directions. Second, they need help creating a culture and structure that supports career experiments. Finally, managers need to be rewarded not for retaining people on their teams but retaining people (and their potential) across the entire organization.

The following three solutions enable managers to support people in growing beyond their teams and increase the chance that top talent will choose to stick around.

Solution 1: Focus career conversations on progression, not promotion.

Career conversations today are often rushed, low quality, or even skipped in favor of day-to-day responsibilities. However, career conversations are one of what Gartner refers to as the “moments that matter” if managers want to retain people. The purpose of a high-quality career conversation should be two-fold: to give employees the permission to be curious about where their career could take them and the practical support to make progress.

Strength spotting

Individuals often struggle to see their strengths, which makes it even more challenging to figure out how those strengths could be applied across different roles and parts of an organization. Career conversations give managers the chance to not only share strengths-based feedback (“I see you at your best when…”) but also to discuss how those strengths might be useful in other teams. They can help employees spot the value in not only what they’re delivering but how they make work happen. For example, there are few teams that wouldn’t benefit from a brilliant problem solver or creative collaborator. Helping employees go beyond being aware of their strengths to understanding how those strengths could be applied in different situations is often the first step in increasing an individual’s confidence to start exploring career possibilities within an organization.

At Microsoft, where we work on the People Analytics team, that means learning what the data can tell us about how our employees aspire to live their lives meaningfully. In particular, we landed on a new way of measuring thriving, at both work and outside of it, that goes beyond engagement only.

In this article, we share how and why we came to this measurement — and how your own company can learn from our experiences.

Why Thriving Is the New North Star

Prior to this year, we conducted one lengthy, annual survey that tracked employee engagement. It often took months to digest and plan actions around. Yet, we consistently encountered challenges in building a shared definition of engagement across the company. And often, despite employee engagement scores that would seem to indicate that things were going well, it became clear that employees were struggling when we dived deeper into the responses. To us, this was a reflection that we hadn’t yet set a high enough bar for the employee experience, and it motivated us to do better in measuring what matters.

So, we started asking employees for feedback through a shorter yet more focused survey every six months, for which we partnered with employee success platform Glint. This new approach is helping us stay closer to employees’ feedback and take clearer and more immediate action in response.

We also sought to define a new, higher bar that went beyond engagement only, drawing inspiration from many sources. One was what Our Chief People Officer, Kathleen Hogan, calls “The 5 P’s.” Similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy, it breaks down employee fulfillment into five key, successive components: pay, perks, people, pride, and purpose. In a time that has prompted many to reflect on the role of work and career in their lives, it felt critical to recalibrate our listening systems to measure our progress towards that end goal — a sense of purpose. We were also inspired by Ross School of Business’s Gretchen Spreitzer and colleagues’ research on thriving as the antidote to languishing. As we moved beyond employee engagement, we decided to focus on our own version of employee thriving.

At Microsoft, we define thriving as “to be energized and empowered to do meaningful work.” This is the new core aspiration we have for our employees, one that challenges us to push ourselves every day so every employee can feel they’re pursuing that sense of purpose. Our focus on thriving isn’t just about recovering from the impact of the pandemic or matching pre-Covid employee sentiment scores. It’s about coming out the other side and doing even better.

What It Looks Like to Thrive

When our first employee survey data came back earlier this year, we began benchmarking our thriving for the first time. We looked at not just how many people reported they were thriving, but calculated company-wide averages based on responses from a five-point scale — if an employee selected “strongly disagree,” that translated to an individual score of zero, and “strongly agree” would be the equivalent of a 100. This ensured our insights took into account all positive, negative, and neutral sentiment.

After analyzing the results, we found that thriving averaged a 77 across the company — a number we see as strong, but one we can still work on. When we broke down thriving into its three components, we saw that meaningful work (79) and empowerment (79) both scored higher among employees than energized (73).

To understand the employee experiences behind the numbers, we dove into the open-ended survey responses. Three key themes stood out.

Culture matters.

What we saw was that employees who were thriving and not thriving were both talking about culture, but in vastly different ways.

Thriving employees talked about a collaborative environment and teamwork with colleagues, an inclusive culture with autonomy and flexibility, and well-being support. These comments reference examples such as being able to have honest, non-judgmental conversations on difficult topics, with a focus on finding solutions.

Employees who weren’t thriving talked about experiencing siloes, bureaucracy, and a lack of collaboration. In these comments we hear a lack of agency and a sense for being a cog in a machine. In other words, the opposite of being empowered and energized to do meaningful work.

Thriving takes a village.

Diving deeper into the numbers, it’s clear that everyone has a role to play. At Microsoft, we’ve long studied importance of managers, and we know their role has been more crucial than ever as they helped their teams navigate through uncertainty. It’s heartening to see our managers shine during such a difficult time. “My manager treats me with dignity and respect” scored a 93, meaning almost every employee selected “strongly agree” — but this also means we still need to ensure that’s the experience for every single employee. We also saw high scores in confidence in manager’s effectiveness (87) and managers’ support for careers (85), showing strong sentiment that managers are helping their teams succeed at the company.

While we see these scores as strengths, they’re strengths we want to keep building to ensure a positive lived experience for all employees.

Thriving and work-life balance are not the same thing.

As we think about how to support thriving, it’s important to distinguish it from work-life balance. While thriving is focused on being energized and empowered to do meaningful work in your role, work-life balance reflects employees’ personal lives, too. Employees rated their satisfaction with work-life balance as a 71, and while it’s encouraging to see work-life balance improving, it hasn’t fully recovered yet to pre-Covid levels. And there are times when thriving and work-life balance can move in different directions.

For example, an early-in-career employee who feels underutilized in their role may have great work-life balance from a perspective of hours and workload, but not feel energized while they’re at work or inspired by the meaning and impact of what they’re working on. On the other hand, there are times when people can thrive and feel so fulfilled by the hard work it takes to make progress on a big project that they can make a short-term tradeoff on work-life balance.

We know that work-life balance may ebb and flow, but wanted to learn from employees who both rated their work-life balance highly and said they were thriving in that work-focused portion of their life. So, we compared the 56% of our employees who said they were thriving and reported higher work-life balance to the 16% who were thriving but had lower work-life balance scores.

By combining sentiment data with de-identified calendar and email metadata, we found that those with the best of both worlds had five fewer hours in their workweek span, five fewer collaboration hours, three more focus hours, and 17 fewer employees in their internal network size. This reinforces what we know from earlier work-life balance research and network size analysis, which showed us that increased collaboration does have a negative impact on employees’ perception of work-life balance. It also confirms that collaboration is not inherently bad — for many employees, those times of close teamwork and striving toward a common goal can fuel thriving. However, it isimportant to be mindful of how intense collaboration can impact work-life balance, and leaders and employees alike should guard against that intensity becoming 24/7.

Challenges for Thriving on the Road Ahead

As more and more companies look closely at how they listen to and help their employees, it’s important to spend time understanding what your north star is — and to make sure it’s connected to the outcomes you are trying to drive as an organization. This new era of hybrid work won’t work for employees if you’re not listening — or if what you’re listening for doesn’t evolve along with them and how they do their jobs. There isn’t a singular one-size-fits-all solution out there, but paying close attention to how your employees thrive is one path forward.

We know this is just the beginning of our journey to understand this in our own organization. Looking holistically at the written responses from those who weren’t thriving offers more clues about where else we can improve for our employees. For example, while employees scored “I feel included in my team” highly at 86, by far the most common thread among those who were not thriving was a feeling of exclusion — from a lack of collaboration to feeling left out of decisions to struggling with politics and bureaucracy. We’ll continue to focus on ensuring inclusion is felt as part of our culture across all teams and orgs.

Ultimately, every score, whether high or low, gives us a baseline to keep listening, learning, improving, and adapting to new changes that still undoubtedly lie ahead. As we enter the hybrid work era, we’re excited to keep studying the numbers even more deeply to understand how thriving can be unlocked across different work locations, professions, and ways of working.

Carter Cast, a clinical professor of entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School and author of The Right—and Wrong—Stuff: How Brilliant Careers are Made and Unmade, describes the disconnect between our stated values and our actual behaviors as an “integrity gap.” 

These gaps often emerge gradually, when we find ourselves making incremental values trade-offs that begin to erode our sense of personal integrity. 

For example, an MBA graduate may take a role that requires a heavy workload and plenty of work travel, vowing not to lose touch with good friends and committing to stay only as long as it takes to acquire specific job skills. They realize that the rigors of the job may threaten to affect their relationships and hobbies. Yet, they are willing to accept this grueling situation, knowing it is for a limited time. 

Until it isn’t. The money is nice, and two years becomes three, then four, then five. Soon enough, their personal life does not remotely reflect their intentions. 

Avoiding an integrity gap can be achieved through reflection and consistent recalibration, says Cast. Below, he shares tools to keep your values and actions more closely aligned.

Commit to Regular Self-Audits

Understanding both your values—those things important enough to you that you don’t want them to be part of any trade-offs—and your motives—those things that give you energy and fulfill you—is critical to making better career decisions. Gaining that understanding takes a bit of self-reflection. 

“Check in with yourself on a regular basis,” Cast says, “about what motivates you and what you consider to be most important in your life. If you do that, you’ll be less likely to find yourself in a job that no longer aligns with your values.”

Maybe you’ve stayed too long in a job where you work every weekend, or no longer feel you are progressing or being challenged. Maybe you just want more time with people you love. Recognizing that can be tough, especially for high-achieving people. 

“For a number of years, I was not very self-reflective,” Cast says. “I just put my head down and worked. But in my early forties, I realized that I had an empty personal life. I was lonely and realized that progressing in my career wasn’t enough. I needed to recalibrate and create the context for a richer, more balanced life.” 

Eventually, Cast realized the importance of having a keen sense of what motivated and energized him. This knowledge helped him identify jobs congruent with those motivations. 

“I asked myself: How can I get paid to do what I love? That question fueled my self-exploration,” Cast says. “I began to listen to my inner self and started making changes in my life to follow it. That meant realizing I loved teaching and counseling people. From there, it dawned on me that I really wanted to be a teacher, not a c-suite executive.” 

Cast suggests conducting a two-part audit. First, create an activity-by-activity list of how you spend your time, drawing from the past month of activities in your calendar. Then, label each activity by whether you consider it an “energy creator,” “neutral,” or an “energy reducer.” Cast color-codes his audit—red for energy reducers, yellow for neutral activities, and green for energy creators.

At the end of the month, pull out the audit and look for trends. Do certain activities give you energy? If so, how can you create a work environment where you do more of that? Do certain activities demotivate you? Can you take them off your plate?

“I was 38 years old and I felt stuck, and I did this very exercise at a Comfort Inn Suites in Colorado one night,” Cast says. “I actually pulled out my resume to refresh my memory and started listing all the activities I’d done in different assignments. I had a list of about 50 work activities.” 

When Cast assessed his audit, he saw that many of the tasks that motivated and inspired him were not part of his current job. He took that as a sign and left that job within a couple of months.

“I realized that it wasn’t just about progressing in my career,” Cast says. “It was about finding ‘good work’ that was a heartfelt expression of myself, work that energized me and had meaning both to me and to those with whom I interacted.” 

Set Boundaries 

Armed with the result from your time and energy audit, you can begin reconfiguring your overall calendar to draw closer to the activities that energize you, while articulating where your limits are.

For example, if your job demands long hours which negatively impact your family, set defined boundaries to make the work more tolerable. This might mean eating dinner with your family a certain number of nights a week or capping the number of late-night calls you are willing to take.

“Most integrity gaps emerge when we ignore—or never set—our non-negotiables,” Cast says. “It’s up to you to know where that line is. What are your non-negotiables? That’s something to think about before you dive into a new job.”

“It’s up to you to know where that line is. What are your non-negotiables? That’s something to think about before you dive into a new job.”

— Carter Cast

Early in my career, I learned to split myself in half. There was a “work Lindsay” and a “personal Lindsay,” and they were never meant to be in the same place at the same time. The underlying notion, rampant across the business world, is that it’s somehow weak to show any signs you’re a person. Better to turn off those personal matters, even if they’re as simple as needing to go home and cook dinner or as mundane as the consequences of spilling coffee on your blouse before a meeting. It all had to stay where it belonged: the personal side and the business side. I was supposed to be chasing the much-discussed work-life balance, constantly trying to force these two sides to be equal. I ended up ignoring my whole self as a result.

Then a transition point in my life changed my perspective. I was changing jobs, before I started Casted, and I’d just read a book that got me thinking about priorities: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. In the book, McKeown characterizes essentialism as “the relentless pursuit of less but better,” a disciplined approach that asks us to sort the “trivial many” from the “vital few” as we choose where we will focus our energy and effort. That perspective spoke to me — the answer wasn’t a transactional notion of hours at my desk or away from my desk — I needed to consciously identify what mattered most to me and take control of my time and attention.

I realized something crucial: No one was going to come to me and say “You should probably work less,” or “Don’t respond to your emails tonight.” Those nudges may happen more now in companies, but work will always fill the cup you give it. As I transitioned into the new job, I had an opportunity to try to put my new perspective into practice. My focus shifted away from the dichotomy of a work-life balance and toward the idea of boundaries around my priorities, my “vital few.”

As I kept working through my perspective on this, I experienced two more life-changing milestones. First, I started working with my executive coach, who helped me understand that business is human. The pursuit of a work-life balance had taken the humanity out of my work. She showed me how ridiculous it was to think your personal life wouldn’t impact your work life and vice versa. The second milestone was starting Casted and stepping into the role of CEO and co-founder. Those milestones led me to a realization: The pursuit of work-life balance is a myth. I seek out boundaries that preserve and nurture my whole self.

LISTEN HERE

Hey WorkLifers, it’s Adam Grant. Welcome back to Taken for Granted, my podcast with the TED Audio Collective. I’m an organizational psychologist. My job is to think again about how we work, lead, and live. Today, my guest is Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft–where he’s worked since 1992. He’s widely admired for transforming the culture, building the cloud business, and steering a 700% gain in shares. His approval rating on Glassdoor is nearly perfect, and this conversation will give you a sense of why: he exudes care, curiosity, and humility. He’s also a big fan of cricket and poetry. And as a computer scientist, of course he loves data–and Microsoft has gathered quite a bit on the future of work. So enjoy.

[00:00:54]:
There was a time and I’m not going to locate it, but you can, when Microsoft was externally known [00:01:00] for a lot of internal competition, forced rankings that pitted people against each other were pretty popular and you came in and challenged that dynamic and said, look, we want to collaborate. We want to be one Microsoft.

[00:01:09] Adam Grant:
Can you help us understand how you made that change? 

[00:01:13] Satya Nadella: 
Being essentially the first non founder CEO, I felt the real need to, in some sense, refound the company or borrowing the phrase that Reid Hoffman users, which I like a lot, because from time to time, companies need that moment where you need to reground yourself and starting with. The sense of purpose and mission, like why do we exist? And if we sort of disappeared with anybody, miss us to remind, because I think every one of us who work in any company need that anchoring in order to then go on to make all the decisions and work we do. And then the other one was to really put forth the culture that we aspire to.

[00:01:52] Satya Nadella: 
And that’s where I bought it from Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset. Uh, which has been a godsend to us because, you know, it’s really helped us go from this, know it all to learn it alls. And that mission and culture has given us, perhaps Adam, more of that permission to look inwards, look to what systems, processes, behaviors, make us successful in the first place and reinforce them. And then the same thing, what systems, processes, and behaviors make us sort of not successful. And then. 

[00:02:25] Adam Grant: 
So, is this the future? Are we in it right now? Or what is it coming? 

[00:02:30] Satya Nadella: 
You know, we definitely are in it and it is going to evolve. I think our expectations of what to read and how we work have gone through a real structural shift, but I think we’re still figuring it out in terms of this next phase, before long-term trends truly step up.

Here’s a collection of some of our favorite insights and research from Kellogg faculty about how to do mentorship right.

Teach Skills—but Don’t Stop There

The mentors who have the biggest positive impact on the success of their mentees tend to be highly skilled and very successful themselves, according to a study by Kellogg professor Brian Uzzi and his colleagues.

An analysis of the careers of more than 37,000 scientist mentors and mentees confirmed that having a mentor who is at the top of their game improves a mentee’s odds of ultimately becoming a superstar themselves by nearly sixfold. 

But here’s something surprising. The study also suggests that the most successful mentees are those who go off to work in a different subject area, charting their own paths. 

“When a student gets this ‘special sauce’ and they apply it to being a mini-me of their mentor, they still do well. But if they apply it to an original new topic of their own, they do even better,” Uzzi says. 

This special sauce, the researchers argue, goes far beyond specific technical skills or subject-matter expertise, and includes tacit knowledge of how groundbreaking work is ideated and produced. This highlights the importance of mentors and mentees spending time and working through problems together, rather than simply ensuring that discrete skills are mastered.

Allow Mentees to “Own” the Relationship

A good mentor makes it clear that their mentee is the one in charge of their own career. Mentees should be the ones setting the agenda for any meetings.

Diane Brink, a senior fellow at Kellogg and a former Chief Marketing Officer at IBM, argues that making the mentee’s agenda a priority keeps them from being swayed towards a career path they may not be interested in following. And it takes pressure off the mentor to act as an all-knowing guru.

Being a mentor is less about telling mentees exactly what to do—only they can decide that—and more about showing up for them, listening to them, and offering nonjudgmental support. 

“As a mentor, your role is to help guide and facilitate how that individual solves a problem or tackles an opportunity,” Brink says.

“As a mentor, your role is to help guide and facilitate how that individual solves a problem or tackles an opportunity.”

— Diane Brink

“You’re asking questions and providing context for greater clarity. You’re not the person who’s going to have all the answers.”

Help Them Think Beyond the Next Job

Here’s another thing mentorship is not, according to Brink: lining up your mentee with their next gig. “That’s not your role,” she says.

It’s a common misunderstanding, and it can set the mentor–mentee relationship off on the wrong foot. Mentors should be clear about what they cannot or will not do about, say, an upcoming promotion and instead encourage mentees to view their careers with a wider lens than they might otherwise. What is their potential? What are their strengths and weaknesses?

“One of the things that I will do throughout my mentoring relationships is to encourage the individual to think about where they see themselves four or five jobs from now. I think it forces the person to think more broadly about their development plan and the types of challenges and potential assignments that they should consider so that they can get there,” she says.

Don’t Be Afraid to Have Tough Conversations

Good managers often find themselves managing an employee’s performance in their current role, while also preparing them for future roles—a task that involves a significant amount of mentorship. 

“Think of yourself as a coach who’s there to unlock the potential of the person,” says Carter Cast, a clinical professor of entrepreneurship at Kellogg. “You work with the talents and gifts of each person so they can do more of what they do well.” 

He stresses the importance of passing along negative feedback about an employee if it is constructive and will help them in the future—even if they are performing just fine in their current role. At times, he says, this can involve “several very hard, very direct conversations.”

He recalls how a senior VP at a Fortune 50 technology firm called Cast nearly a decade later to tell him that their conversations about his inability to partner well with others had been crucial to his career development.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Cast says. “Thinking back, those conversations were so uncomfortable for both of us. But I think he realized later that I wouldn’t have gone through the discomfort if I didn’t care about his development. He wasn’t a lost cause. He was just missing an ingredient—the ability to enlist the support of others effectively—and he had to go find it.”

Consider Career Development at the Organizational Level, Too

While mentoring generally takes place between individual mentors and mentees, organizations wanting to maximize the career potential of their employees—and deepen their own future pool of leaders—should consider spreading the benefits of career development widely.

Very widely. Bernard Banks, a clinical professor and associate dean of leadership, is a fan of betting on everyone. Which doesn’t mean that you can’t differentiate among whom you give which opportunities. But it does mean that nobody should be left behind to stagnate or find their own way. Providing informal training sessions, offering new on-the-job experiences, and encouraging individuals to build mentor–mentee relationships can be relatively inexpensive, but meaningful.

Banks says that this approach not only cultivates leadership across the organization but helps retain talent as well. “Many times you’ll see individuals say, ‘I left the firm because I didn’t feel like anyone was taking a marked interest in my development,’” he says. “Sometimes people construe that as, ‘They just didn’t send me to this course.’ But it’s more than that.”

Many, if not most, of us live our lives by endlessly dealing with challenges and then enjoying ourselves when we can. We often don’t have the time or energy to make decisions and choices to experience what we envisioned when we graduated from high school. What happened to those dreams?

We spend a lot of time reacting to our circumstances instead of creating the life that we want. The problem is that any time you are anxious or frustrated, you are reacting to some unpleasant event from the past that was kicked up by the present. That is how every living creature survives. 

We learn what is safe versus threatening and attempt to live our lives in a range that is neutral or safe. It is also well known that avoiding danger is a stronger driving force for behaviors than seeking safety. In addition to avoiding physical danger, humans strive to avoid mental threats, which have the same impact on our nervous system and body. Research has shown that the physiological responses are the same.¹ But since we cannot escape from our thoughts, all of us have some level of a constantly activated nervous system that wears us down. There nare many ways to de-energize this process, required for healing. 

The other facet of healing is moving into the part of your brain that experiences pleasure and is safe. It is a process and an acquired skill. As with becoming a virtuoso violinist, it requires repetition to make it a habit. It is the only way to affect the subconscious operations of your brain.

ReaCtive to Creative

If you move the letter “C” from the middle of the word “reactive” to the beginning, you have the word “creative.” If you can create some space between your stress and reactivity, you can substitute a more rational response, and, with repetition,, your brain physically changes (neuroplasticity). A foundational step is expressive writing, which creates space between you and your reactivity.

Creating structure to organize your life lowers stresses. You see them more clearly and make better proactive decisions. It also creates some “space” and perspective. If you can’t see all the aspects of a problem, it is harder to solve. But if you do, then you can create small behavioral changes that become habitual. 

While an important aspect of this journey out of pain is to learn and adopt an organizational system, at the same time it seems overwhelming. So, the first step is to do something—anything. You may not have the energy to figure out what you really want at this point. But just get started. 

Begin–Anywhere

Start small—very small. I presented a template of a personal “business plan” earlier in this leg of the journey. You may have felt that you don’t have the bandwidth to do this or that you just can’t do it. Don’t worry about it. Just do something (anything) to start the process. Here are some suggestions, and whatever works for you is the key:

· Take piece of paper every morning and write down one optional goal of something you want to accomplish. Just one. It may be as simple as staying out of bed for 15 minutes longer than usual.

· Then write down five things you might do to create more order in your life. 

· It might resemble your usual to-do list, but it is a more thoughtful set of actions. 

· One of the to-do items could be creating some time for your self-care. 

· What routine might you create to center yourself and connect with the day – with or without your pain?

Many of the so-called success stories I’ve spent time with are filling a void. They work to feel worthy, they binge on Netflix or alcohol to numb pain and they obsess about achieving to distract from their existential duress. They post certain things on social media to pacify their perceived inadequacy and try to feel better about themselves by looking good on the outside. They busy themselves by getting what they want, only to realize they never wanted it in the first place. 

To start up a business, entrepreneurs have to stop working as an employee and start thinking like a boss. However, many owners fail to let go of the paradigm of thinking that their authentic happiness, freedom and fulfillment are only worthy when goals are attained. They plan their work as if how they feel at the end of the day and their life does not matter. Each day ends up feeling forced and they’re constantly facing friction by choosing between time with loved ones or making money.

It doesn’t have to be this way

A few generations ago, earning was for survival and safety. More recently, it shifted to earning and giving our family options. 

Now, entrepreneurs can earn as a natural byproduct of doing what makes them feel good. Ultimately, our fulfillment is infinitely more important than hitting targets and buying the next thing.

What stays behind is the legacy of the feeling we leave people with.

We can only make people feel as good as we feel

Well-being comes down to balancing what brings us joy while simultaneously having the discipline to execute the strategies necessary to physicalize goals. 

Many get stuck too far on one side of the pendulum and find themselves not feeling good. On one side, people work hard and don’t do anything they love. On the other side, people do what they love and live in the flow, but avoid what doesn’t feel favorable, therefore not creating the growth or results they want. Neither of these options is optimal.

It’s my job to be an active, conscious vehicle who serves other people and enjoys the life I’m blessed to experience each day. Being driven and enjoying life don’t have to be in conflict when you frame it correctly. Connecting your work to something bigger than your ego’s subconscious fears is essential to feel fulfilled. 

You’ve gotta have faith

Creating and transforming your life and business needs to come from your vision backed by belief, not your subconscious fears.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Does my job fulfill my potential to create an impact?
• Is my work more superficial than what God, or the Universe, is calling me to do?
• Where can I redirect my energy?

The ability to reflect and redirect is what makes us powerful beyond measure. You get to consciously create the life you live. Make it count. 

Why are so many people quitting their jobs? According to a recent McKinsey report, employers believe that it is a problem with compensation or work-life balance. But the employees who are quitting tell a different story. Their main reasons for quitting are 1) not feeling valued and 2) not feeling a sense of belonging. And yet during the pandemic, the most productive companies actually broke this trend and improved employee job satisfaction by 48%. What do these successful organizations have in common? They practice five principles that help their teams connect and thrive.

To illustrate these principles, we’ll use the example of Michelle Taite, a CMO who was appointed to help accelerate the integration of two companies after an acquisition. As we reimagine work in the post-pandemic era, consider how these principles can help you create a sense of belonging on your team and show team members that they are indeed valued.

Put People First

When the conditions are right, people can accomplish more together than anyone could alone. In an ideal world, the more people give, the more they get. A win for one is a win for all. Achievement is a positive sum game. In this state, people feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. Enjoyment heightens and productivity is elevated in turn. When a team does not achieve this, they enter a zero sum game, a state where everyone is motivated by their own self-interests, and the team as a whole suffers. Insight Center Collection Reimagining WorkBeyond a return to “normal.” 

Foster a positive sum game by creating an environment where team members join together, rather than protecting themselves from the zero sum game. This happens when team members relax into a trusting relationship that they feel is not just transactional but based in genuine care. When that relationship is achieved, team members trust each other to have their backs and respect each other as individuals with needs, aspirations, and joys. Referred to as shared empathy, this state is a leading indicator of effective teams. Leaders and teams cultivate shared empathy when they learn and care about each other’s deeper experience and take interest in each other’s lives — celebrating birthdays and inquiring about people’s children, spouses, and hobbies.

When Michelle stepped into her new role, she introduced herself to her team first and foremost as a person. She shared pictures of her family, her interests, and her heritage. Michelle’s team created a Slack channel devoted to fun and people, letting their personalities shine. She posted snippets from her own life, like a weekend family photo or her child’s meltdown with the caption “sometimes mornings are interesting here.” Make time for humor and create room for personal connection. Open meetings with ice breakers like, “What made you laugh this weekend?”, “What’s your favorite candy?”, or “What was a highlight and lowlight of your week?”

Rally Around Shared Goals

Anyone who has ever been a part of a sports team knows that achieving together can be a bonding experience. Tapping into the desire for greatness, team members strive together and challenge each other to bring their best. The joy of learning and ultimately winning is magnified tenfold when shared with others. Challenges bond teams — but only if they share a belief that striving to win unites them.

Michelle and her team use the hashtag #BeatOurBest to galvanize themselves around bold goals as they strive to build on their greatest achievements. When defining their marketing goals, the team framed the conversation around two questions: “What must we do to truly serve the needs of our customers and fuel growth?” and “How might we #BeatOurBest?” The how encouraged teammates to learn, experiment, and push the boundaries in service of the greater goal. And they specifically use the hashtag to unify. Michelle signs off in her weekly email with “Let’s #BeatOurBest together.” The hashtag helps orient them to the shared experience of reaching into the unknown and discovering just how big their wins can be.

Model Humility and Curiosity

People bond when they share a set of values that make them feel like there is something special about their group. Humility and curiosity are two values that can supercharge bonding. Humility is the recognition of our limits. When a leader models humility, it opens up space for others to contribute. The leader is recognizing gaps that others can fill and also creating an environment where it is psychologically safe to give bold ideas and risk being wrong. Curiosity is the recognition that there is always more to learn. This fuels the excitement of experimentation and growth.

Recognize opportunities to show humility by responding to feedback with openness and curiosity instead of defensiveness. Lead with inquiry and be clear that your proposals are a starting point. This encourages divergent opinions and creativity. Michelle demonstrated humility and curiosity when she told her team, “I am going to ask a lot of questions. They might be stupid, but that’s okay. I’d really love to learn.” To encourage curiosity, show delight in moments of discovery directly and indirectly related to the work. In her weekly newsletter, Michelle shares insights and inspiration she gathers from her own reading, podcasts, and TED videos. These serve as thought starters for the team.

And while many leaders are unapologetic about having no intention to drive even a modicum of meaningful change, there are countless others who truly support DEI in their heads and hearts but are sheepishly paralyzed in practice—leaders who deeply struggle with making the transition from well-intentioned believer to high-impact builder.

For such leaders—and for all of us—President Biden’s historic nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to become the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court is particularly instructive. If confirmed, Jackson would be only the eighth person to sit on the Supreme Court bench who was not a white man since the Court’s establishment in 1789. Biden, who has consistently signaled his commitment to use his presidential power to advance DEI, promised to nominate a Black woman to the Court in the event of a vacancy—and, to his credit, he followed through. Biden’s handling of Jackson’s groundbreaking nomination offers three practical lessons that can help leaders to get unstuck and, ultimately, better connect their creeds and their deeds. 

Be precise with what “diversity” means in your context 

One aspect of Biden’s approach to this Supreme Court nomination process that was as courageous as it was controversial is the precision with which he declared what “diversity” would look like in this case – namely, that he intended to diversify the Court by adding a Black woman. Without any context, the word “diversity” simply refers to our human differences, whether based on race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion, ideology, age/generation, or other factors; it does not expressly refer to particular types of people or assume a particular status hierarchy of haves and have-nots. But in the context of corporate DEI, “diversity” is most often used as an imprecise, catch-all category referring to all of the have-nots who are most often underrepresented in the executive ranks – individuals from a wide array of stigmatized, marginalized, and historically disadvantaged groups. Though politically correct, this imprecision often forestalls meaningful action because progress requires strategic acuity and tactical specificity. If Black and Hispanic women, for example, are not represented in senior management, leaders should say as much in addition to espousing a general commitment to “diversity.” 

When committing to increase “diversity,” there can be wisdom in explicitly naming what “diversity” means in a particular context because it can force a sober analysis of which groups have been underrepresented, why, and what can be done to solve for the exclusion. After all, you cannot fix what you are unwilling to face. Ambiguous executive commitments to “diversity” may make for great soundbites, but alone, they rarely fuel measurable progress. To be sure, adopting a generic pro-diversity stance may be easier for leaders than articulating a specific vision of what diversifying their organizations will look like in clear, observable terms. And yet, summoning the clarity and courage to speak with precision can be key in helping leaders gain the traction to accelerate their DEI impact. The road to lasting change begins with a willingness to commit to a vivid picture of the organization’s current state and precisely what “diversity” progress will look like in practice. 

Be Prepared to Combat the “Diversity Equals Deficiency” Myth

Upon the announcement of Justice Breyer’s retirement, President Biden promised to nominate a Black woman with “extraordinary qualifications, character, experience, and integrity” to the High Court. While these qualifiers should have been able to go unspoken, people of color, women, and others from historically underrepresented groups are chronically assumed to be incompetent until proven otherwise. Consequently, efforts to diversify organizations are routinely beset by a single question: whether the organization should hire the “best” available candidate or the “diverse” candidate. This cringeworthy “question” subtly suggests that underrepresented candidates will be inherently deficient because diversity and excellence are somehow opposites. Anyone who’s ever advanced underrepresented talent knows that the presumption of incompetence for “diverse candidates”—not to mention double-minorities like Jackson (who is both Black and a woman)—will be the proverbial elephant in the boardroom. Such thinking is nothing more than a paper-thin façade for a polished prejudice that believes that obstructing DEI progress is in the best interest of ensuring strong organizational performance.

Inaction is a decisive vote cast in favor of preserving the very status quo that DEI efforts are designed to transform.

— Nicholas Pearce

When building a team at a startup earlier in my career, our investors, advisors, and I crafted what looked like a bullet-proof recruiting strategy. Our advisory group collectively had more than 100 years of experience operating companies. But despite the wealth of expertise behind our hiring process, I learned an important lesson the hard way: Even the most rigorous recruiting strategy is only as strong as the decision-maker’s biggest blind spot.

“Elliot,” a media professional I interviewed, was articulate, energetic, and showed a natural affinity for our product. His credentials were solid, and — crucially — he was willing to take an equity position in lieu of a large salary. For a startup, this was a big factor. We hired him.*

But in recommending this decision, I overlooked a few red flags. Notably, Elliot admitted to leaving a trail of burned bridges with former employers and was convinced he’d been repeatedly victimized by unappreciative bosses and bad environments. He didn’t make a good impression on our lead investor, and his own references spoke about him in neutral tones. But he had what I thought counted: passion and potential. I believed I could fix the rest.

Elliot ultimately stirred up numerous problems for the company. We believe that he stole information, lied, and destroyed intellectual property. While we couldn’t have foreseen the extent of this behavior, we dismissedwarning signs right from the start. Our problem wasn’t a lack of knowledge about hiring best practices — it was my own blind spot. I downplayed the risk, thinking we could rehabilitate this troubled candidate and bring out his potential. So, despite the warning signs and a major investor’s concerns, I made the recommendation to bring him on board.

Having now worked with and mentored dozens of leaders and founders, I know I’m not alone. Nearly every hiring manager has a blind spot that, if left unidentified, can lead to devastating consequences even within well-planned systems. Over time, I’ve identified five of the most common blind spots that compromise recruitment outcomes.

Fixing and rescuing

This was my blind spot with Elliot, and one that is common among founders and other entrepreneurial leaders. Entrepreneurs are by nature more likely than average to believe they can affect massive change. This can extend to an overconfidence in their ability to “develop” employees, even in light of evidence that a person is lacking the requisite character traits for growth, like accountability and openness to feedback. A superstar sports coach rehabilitating a talented but self-destructive athlete makes for good television, but the reality is that most hiring managers don’t have the resources, skills, or time to reform troubled hires.

Beyond overconfidence in their problem-solving skills, entrepreneurs are also vulnerable to this pattern because of their tight budgets. They’re often looking for a deal, and a candidate willing to take a sizeable portion of their salary in equity represents just that. Leaders with pride in their organization will assume that the individual’s motivation is their passion for the business. They’ll overlook the possibility that other reasons may drive someone to take a step down financially — including a lack of options.

If you recognize this blind spot in yourself, one of the best ways to mitigate the danger is obvious but underused: Don’t make hiring decisions alone. Seek out a second opinion. If you already have a second opinion, don’t make my mistake — listen to it.

Validation seeking

“Emily,” a tech startup CEO, found her business in jeopardy when her product experienced a massive feature failure in beta testing. No one on her team had voiced any criticisms pre-launch. She didn’t understand how this was possible. But Emily admitted that she only hired people who showed unbounded enthusiasm in interviews. She deemed candidates who under-praised the product “not passionate enough.”

As a result, she overlooked contrarian candidates, the exact people who call out problems even when doing so is unpopular. A study out of Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management warns that leaders who develop “heightened overconfidence from high levels of such ingratiatory behavior” will be less likely to “initiate needed strategic change.” Emily, who conflated validation with passion, was a case in point.

If you have a validation-seeking blind spot, also known as “affect-based” decision making, realize that pointing out flaws does take passion. It requires attention, analysis, and the courage to speak up. Praise is easy. Don’t overlook the candidates who offer thought-provoking criticism of your business, even if your knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss them.

Boundary breaching

“Anna,” a marketing executive, believed a selling point for job candidates was that her team was “like a family” — at least until a colleague confessed that the team resented how much time Anna spent helping “Jill,” one of her direct reports, navigate her divorce. With Jill, something was always wrong — with her partner, her parents, her social life, her car — and Anna felt it was her duty to indulge these “emergencies,” often at the expense of the rest of the team, who picked up the slack.

Anna remembered how drawn Jill was to the idea of a tight-knit team during the interview process. What Anna didn’t understand is that there is a time and place for empathy. Empathy can turn a good leader into a great leader, but it can also be misapplied.

In describing her team as a family, Anna thought she was signaling an empathetic culture to job candidates. But language like “we’re a family” or “we’re always there for each other no matter what,” actually signals a lack of professional boundaries.

If you find yourself attracting high-drama candidates who monopolize everyone’s time, make a note of any overly personalized language you might be using. Also be wary of oversharing by candidates, particularly when they present personal stories as mitigating factors for recurring problems at work.

Micromanaging

Most people accept, at least in theory, that micromanagement is an undesirable practice rooted in self-doubt and uncertainty. Nevertheless, many leaders still signal a micromanaged culture to candidates while recruiting them. Self-determination, autonomy, and a strong internal locus of control inspire the creative impulse. Enterprising people require the freedom to take risks, make mistakes, and challenge engrained suppositions.

Thus, a hiring manager who hints at heavy oversight during recruitment will likely attract candidates who tolerate inflexible environments well — individuals who lack passion, are not highly engaged, prefer linear work, and are not highly driven.

If you find yourself struggling to attract and hire self-managing, creative people, it’s worth considering the signals you’re sending. Think about whether you may be placing too much emphasis on rules and procedures, glamorizing the hierarchy or org chart, or suggesting that all conflict (some of which can be productive) is unwelcome.

As a leader, it’s up to you to set a creative standard that helps your business stand out and safeguards its future success. Time is of the essence, but if you’re still wondering whether you should prioritize thinking outside of the box in your leadership strategy, read on to discover why innovative leaders win the day. 

Change is good — and exciting 

Innovation is change, and that can look like simplified processes for your team and customers. For example, if you change the way you gather information about your target market, you may be newly able to anticipate customers’ needs and proactively address them — resulting in more happy clients and sales. In this way, change has the potential to be an overwhelming positive, and your ability to adapt continuously translates to direct successes for your company. 

What’s more, doing the same thing over and over for a long period of time doesn’t only get boring for your customers, but also for you and your team. Innovation cures boredom because it makes work exciting again. The monotony of the day-to-day could discourage your team and lower its productivity; you may even start to lose employees who crave more challenges. Constant innovation, growth and creation ensure your team — and, by extension, your customers — remains invested in your company. Innovation should happen at every level of your company, and all feedback should be taken seriously for maximum results.

Technology evolves; so do consumer needs 

Technology keeps advancing, and it waits for no one. For example, new social-media platforms are created constantly, and they translate to new ways of marketing your product and business. Leaders must keep up with these innovations. Choosing to ignore them will leave your company stagnant and in the past while your competitors rise to the top and push their companies forward. 

Moreover, consumer’s needs are what drive your company, and you need to keep up with them. Consumers may accept what you’re offering today, but tomorrow they might want it faster, bigger, smaller or delivered. Stay in touch with your consumers. Constantly ask for their feedback, but more importantly, as previously mentioned, meet their needs before they even think to ask. Continuously creating new and exciting experiences for them will keep them happy and you ahead of the curve. 

Innovation spurs success after success 

Falling behind is never good for business. If you begin to see sales lag, take a good look at what your competitors are doing because you probably need to step your innovation game up. Customers are always looking for new and exciting things from a business, and if you are not providing that for them, they will find it elsewhere.  Again, it’s worth emphasizing that you don’t want to be a follower, struggling to remain a profitable contender in the market. Instead, set the bar for other companies; be their example of success. 

At the end of the day, it’s simple, really: Innovation is important for a business’s success, and as leaders, we should spearhead our companies’ creative efforts. We don’t want our companies to be left in the past; we want to be pioneers in the development of our respective markets, keeping up with technological advances and our customers’ ever-evolving needs. Innovate today and never stop growing. 

Here are some specific steps that employers can take to build their leadership pipeline while offering opportunities shown to increase employee engagement, productivity and longevity.

A look at the research

According to Gartner research, more than half of employees indicate that it’s important for their employers to offer real opportunities for personal growth. 

Employers benefit as well. The Association for Talent Development (ATD) indicates that when organizations offer comprehensive training, they experience a profit margin 24% higher than those that spend less time on training and development activities.

These efforts can also help in building the kind of diversity in leadership ranks that so many companies — and their customers and employees — value today.

Positive impact on diversity

Being proactive in coming up with ways to lay the foundation for employee development and growth can go a long way toward addressing the lack of diversity in senior leadership positions. This is true all the way to board seats.

It’s well-known that the leadership pipeline can be a rate-limiting factor for upward growth if that pipeline is populated primarily by traditional stereotypes. And yet, at many organizations, that continues to be the case. It’s not necessarily because of anything these organizations have willfully done to keep persons of a diverse background out of the pipeline, but more because of what many have not done — proactively taken steps to ensure that typically underrepresented groups of employees are getting the training, development and coaching support to move into higher-level roles.

Here are some ways organizations can invest in making the corporate ladder climbable while paving the way for greater leadership diversity.

Help managers develop coaching skills

Don’t assume that your managers are all adept at and comfortable with coaching employees and helping them grow and develop to move into higher-level positions. Many aren’t. But you can help to provide the tools, training and resources to help them serve in this very important role.

As part of this training, teach managers how to work with employees to develop personal development plans (PDPs) as part of the performance management process.

Encourage both upskilling and reskilling

Not every employee will be interested in moving up the proverbial ladder. And, let’s face it, most organizations have very limited opportunities for employees who may be interested to move into higher-level roles. That doesn’t mean, though, that they can’t or shouldn’t pursue opportunities to learn new skills that might prepare them for other lateral, or even lower-level, positions within your organization.

In today’s fast-paced and continually changing environment, the need for new skills is apparent in organizations of all kinds. Upskilling can provide as much value for meeting employee development needs for some employees as preparing them to move into other roles. 

As hybrid work transitions from a temporary pandemic-era band-aid to the normal way of working, many leaders are wondering how they build an inclusive hybrid culture. The pandemic laid bare existing inequalities at work — around caregiving, race and even age — and while there is an opportunity to “build back better,” the path to “better” is unclear, even for leaders committed to inclusive organizations. This is in large part because not all working arrangements work the same for all employees. A policy or “perk” that benefits some people and makes them feel included, can make others feel like they do not belong or cannot thrive.

When it comes to designing an inclusive hybrid work culture, there are three main tensions that organizations and teams need to manage:

• First, the tension between allowing employees to work when they want and expecting them to be available all the time;
• Second, the tension between employees feeling isolated when not working from an office and feeling invaded by communication technologies;
• Finally, the tension between what practices are possible in a hybrid workplace and what is preferred and rewarded.

The right balance for each organization will vary based on organizational priorities, and on its employees and their interests. But identifying — and naming — these tensions will offer leaders a place from which they can start strategizing.

Tension #1: Working Anytime vs. Working All the Time

The first tension leaders and organizations need to manage is between giving individuals the chance to work when they choose and imposing — intentionally or not — an expectation that they be available all the time. Research has documented the “ideal worker” is expected to be available at any hour of the day, any day of the year, throughout all the years of their careers. During the pandemic, the burden of ideal worker expectations fell especially hard on the shoulders of women, who often not only did their day jobs but were also primarily caregivers for family members.

One way to counter the expectation of constant availability is to offer your team the flexibility to choose when they work, while also making clear that there should be times when they’re offline. There is robust evidence that control over one’s schedule helps employees maintain engagement at work and protect their well-being. However, organizations need to ensure that in offering flexibility, they’re not sending the message that employees should always be on or available. Indeed, during the pandemic, average working hours increased, and people were more likely to send emails after traditional work hours. Even beyond the pandemic, when people do not have boundaries between work and home and are not able to “shut off” work, they are more likely to experience burnout.

One practice that some organizations have used to manage this tension is limiting communication during typical after-hours. Leaders can model this by scheduling calls and emails to send the next business day rather than at 10:00 pm, for example. Also, for anyone who doesn’t work standard hours, they can set an email signature acknowledging “My working hours may not be your working hours. Please do not feel the need to respond outside of your working hours,” which will reinforce the norm.

Another approach is to have company-wide no work times. For example, when the Boston Consulting Group implemented a formal mechanism that required employees to take pre-planned days and nights off, employees reported higher job satisfaction, greater likelihood that they could imagine a long-term career at the firm, and higher satisfaction with their work-life balance.

Tension #2: Isolation vs. Invasion

The second tension organizations have to manage is between employees feeling isolated and feeling invaded. The pandemic has reminded us that part of what brings many employees to the office is connection with others. The chance to interact with others, even briefly, fosters a sense of deep belonging to a team and organizational identity. However, as leaders seek to give employees the opportunity to connect virtually, they also have to be careful that individuals don’t feel invaded. For example, many Black employees have experienced virtual work as particularly invasive. While home was once a private space for authentic cultural expression, videoconferencing transformed this formerly safe space into focal points of public gaze.

To battle feelings of isolation, organizations can reshape social connections by strengthening friendship ties. We’ve heard about companies instituting weekly social time, such as a 20-minute window to discuss a different, light-hearted but personal prompt, like sharing your favorite movie or best birthday memory. Even brief connections with colleagues can decrease the emotional exhaustion caused by loneliness, and help prevent burnout.

To make these prompts feel less invasive, encourage employees to use their discretion in terms of what they feel comfortable sharing, and let them know it’s okay to maintain privacy when they need or prefer it. For example, leaders may invite people to attend certain meetings without video. This would have the added benefit of reducing video-conferencing fatigue. For highly interactive and conversational meetings when seeing one another matters, an organization might create team or organization-based Zoom backgrounds to level the playing field. This has the advantage of proactively embracing an organizational or team culture, and not making employees feel like they are hiding their home space.

Tension #3: Possible vs. Preferred

A final tension that organizations have to manage is between what is possible and what is preferred. One great promise of hybrid work is that individuals will be able to work from home. Indeed, multiple studies show that flexibility allows individuals, especially mothers, to maintain their working hours after having children and even stay in relatively demanding and well-paid occupations through times of high family demand.

Here’s how you can improve each area of outreach.

Sales

Reaching out to the person who makes the decisions is important. An insane amount of time can be wasted pitching a person without decision-making power. There are so many partnerships where a person might want final approval on the large decisions that are made.

Identifying the pain points of a potential customer can be done by email. Closing a sale is far easier when pitching only what a client or customer needs rather than pitching services or products that they do not. Upselling is one thing, but pushing additional spending can backfire.

Sales emails including a questionnaire might seem presumptuous, so keep that email for when you have established contact. The questionnaire can help hone a pitch as this can make a potential customer feel valued. Generic pitches are something that any person can see is happening — which doesn’t instill confidence in a sales prospect.

Social media outreach 

Facebook pages for businesses are great for sales outreach, but using the platform to message someone on a personal account can be a huge overstep. Use the platform to generate sales through ads and promote content, but not for direct outreach. Asking for contact information is even too much, as most top sales professionals can find the contact information of nearly anyone.

Twitter is a platform to build rapport that can lead to comfort in sending an outreach email or message. Building this rapport here will generate far better results than simply doing a random pitch. 

Instagram can also be a way to build rapport with other customers and businesses. Sending out alerts of sales can drive a few sales but can also lead to being unfollowed as some people loathe being spammed.

Avoid automated LinkedIn messages, as this can put a potential client off immediately. These outreach messages are so generic that it is easy to sift through legitimate messages and sales/partnership opportunities. 

LinkedIn can be an amazing way to handle and generate many sales. Being able to directly reach out to a person allows you to make sure an email you send is not buried in a spam folder. Finding former colleagues is always a good idea as they might need services that a company provides. People would rather work with those who understand their quality of work than a person/company they have very little knowledge about. 

Marketing

Influencer outreach can be tough depending on the level of influencer you are trying to reach. Most influencers are going to be quite selective about the brands they work with due to their image and other brands or company partnerships. Looking at social media accounts can allow a company to get in touch with the influencer or their representation.

The right influencers are getting outreach emails all the time so standing out matters. Building rapport over email should be done by researching the target so something personable can be included. Medium-sized influencers have been shown to convert more in terms of ROI for companies. Larger influencers might not have the true trust of their followers for a variety of reasons.

Outreach emails that build rapport can even lead to a discounted marketing campaign. Influencers might not have set prices and want to work with cool brands or people they might like. Building this rapport can take time and a flurry of emails but it will be worth it. Note that ego being stroked during this can work wonders especially if the flattering comment required being a fan or extensive research. 

Fred Keller, the founder of Cascade Engineering, wanted to show that a for-profit business could also help address society’s social ills. So he accepted an employee’s suggestion that they hire unemployed locals. They rented a van, went to a low-income area of Grand Rapids, Michigan and — with the eight men they identified — started Cascade’s welfare-to-career program.

Their first attempt failed completely. Not one of the people hired remained after a few weeks: the men they hired weren’t prepared or equipped for the requirements of regular work, and Cascade wasn’t prepared to help them succeed. “We didn’t know what we didn’t know,” recalls one of the managers involved, so they resorted to “tough love” that just didn’t work.

For most leaders, this inauspicious beginning would likely have also been the end. It seemed to confirm the common sentiment that helping people get out of intergenerational poverty isn’t a role business can or should try to play. But not to Keller. For him, the initial outcome was simply data — the first attempt hadn’t worked, so clearly there were things to learn before taking another step.

The second attempt — which involved a partnership wherein potential Cascade employees first learned basic job skills and accountability at a local Burger King — failed, too. Cascade’s managers still didn’t really understand what it took to help this type of employee, and were frustrated with the additional effort “Fred’s program” took. Leaders of other businesses thought it proved Keller was naive to think companies could address this type of social problem.

Amidst this internal and external criticism, Keller persevered. He, and then everyone in a managerial position at Cascade, underwent focused training on intergenerational poverty. He continued to be a cheerleader, encouraging managers to embrace the broader purpose they were serving. And he stepped further outside the box and convinced the state of Michigan to — for the first time — place a public social worker onsite at a for-profit business.

With those supports in place and a never-give-up, continuous learning culture infused from the top, the program slowly found solid footing. Managers pushed through the hard times — iterating toward new processes that facilitated employee-social worker interaction without being too cumbersome, overcoming perceptions that there were two sets of standards, refusing to bow to employee threats to leave, and eventually letting go some employees whose attitude got in the way of their performance — because they believed in what they were trying to do and in Fred Keller.

If Keller had been hung up on old-fashioned notions of how to lead, none of this would have happened. He would have blamed others, given up, and tried to focus others on the company’s success on traditional business metrics. He certainly wouldn’t have been willing to be vulnerable by acknowledging that initial attempts hadn’t worked or that he didn’t know how to solve a problem. He wouldn’t have gone first in asking for help, or repeatedly publicly apologized for mistakes along the way.

Most of us know that our “tough guy” views (and yes, sadly, they are highly masculine) of “leadership,” “bravery,” and “courage”—the very ones Fred Keller repeatedly refused to embody — are outdated, sub-optimal, and sometimes downright dangerous for the organizations where most types of work get done today. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean we aren’t still driven by more intuitive, comic-book-hero notions.

This is an example of what evolutionary scholars call mismatch theory— the idea that something that was once useful for survival has not evolved quickly enough to match the current environment. While it may once have been useful to think of courageous leaders as those who were physically strongest and most aggressive (when daily survival did depend on not being killed by wild animals and being able to kill them instead), those traits are no longer the critical ones in most current settings.

In that case, it’s time to consciously reconsider – and then choose to act more frequently on – a new view of courageous leadership, which I also cover in my book Choosing Courage. Below are some starting points for a view that would be much better matched to today’s environment.

Courageous leaders display openness and humility

Pretending to be fearless no matter how good the reasons to be afraid, or acting like a know-it-all no matter how obvious it is that neither you nor anyone else has all the answers, isn’t impressive. It’s dangerous — for yourself and for those who depend on you.

As Aristotle noted over 2,000 years ago there’s clearly a difference between courage and foolhardiness. It’s foolish, not courageous, to lead a hiking group toward a bear that will obviously kill you all for no good reason. Likewise, leading people in your organization into all kinds of trouble because you couldn’t acknowledge you were afraid or needed others’ expertise isn’t courageous. It’s dangerous.

Here’s the thing: Once people know you’re competent, it makes you look stronger (not weak) when you admit “I don’t know” or say “Please help with this.” Think about the myriad difficulties faced during the Covid-19 pandemic. Did you admire and feel more drawn to your leader if she came online and acted as if nothing at all was troubling her? Or, instead, when she also admitted she was facing a series of work and life challenges unlike any in the past, but was committed to getting it through it together and becoming stronger as a group as a result?

The same is true with apologies. When a leader genuinely says, “I’m sorry, I screwed that up,” we see that person as more likeable and more trustworthy. We want to help make the situation better. In contrast, we don’t think someone is a good leader or a hero because they cover up mistakes with lies or omissions. We think they’re weak or a jerk, and we try to distance ourselves as quickly as possible.

Courageous leaders put principles first

Real leadership isn’t about winning a popularity contest. It’s about doing important work on behalf of others. And because there are always going to be differences of opinion and limited resources, you’re probably not going to make much progress on that important work if you can’t stand the thought of upsetting some people some of the time.

Michael Bloomberg clearly understood this during his tenure as Mayor of New York City. “If I finish my term in office… and have high approval ratings, then I wasted my last years in office,” he said. “You always want to press, and you want to tackle the issues that are unpopular, that nobody else will go after.” If things are going pretty well, said Bloomberg, you’re skiing on what for you is a bunny hill and it’s time to move to a steeper slope.”

Leadership as a popularity contest is, in short, a high-school or Hollywood view of leadership. Good leadership is about being trusted and respected for the defensibility of the decisions you make. It’s about courageous action to defend core principles, even when it costs something significant — potentially even one’s own popularity or standing in the short run.

Courageous leaders focus on making environments safer for others

In the vast majority of organizations, entreating people to routinely stick their necks out despite legitimate fear isn’t exactly a sign of strong leadership. Yet that’s what leaders who “encourage courage” are essentially doing. They’re implicitly saying that because they aren’t courageous enough to change the conditions in their organization to make it safer for people to be honest, try new things, or take other prudent risks, everyone else should be courageous enough to do them anyway.

Sadly, that’s not going to create an environment where people routinely do more of the things that are needed for individuals or organizations to learn, change, and thrive. Even superheroes know this doesn’t work. They don’t spend their time trying to make everyone else a superhero; they spend their time trying to create safer conditions where courageous action isn’t routinely called for.

The leaders we need today surround themselves with, and promote, people who help them learn by challenging rather than flattering them. They reward rather than punish those who try new things, even when they don’t go well. They change outdated systems that exclude diverse perspectives.

The leaders we need today demonstrate, rather than demand, courageous action. They choose, like Fred Keller did, to be vulnerable — even if their position, gender, race, or other status markers mean they don’t have to.

Unfortunately, these efforts have had decidedly mixed results. Research has shown that entrepreneurship training for underprivileged founders has little impact on firm profitability. Entrepreneurial initiatives often fail to address urgent local issues, and high-tech growth in poor regions tends to enlarge income gaps rather than creating much-anticipated trickle-down effects. A recent review of more than 200 articles on entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation found that entrepreneurial initiatives aiming to address poverty through venture investment have been generally ineffective. A study that analyzed the impact of entrepreneurship across 44 countries similarly concluded that growth-oriented entrepreneurship did not generate as much impact in emerging economies as it did in developed economies, and that regions generally only benefit from high-growth entrepreneurship after reaching a certain threshold level of development.

Why are these entrepreneurship-driven efforts to boost regional prosperity — strategies that have been extremely effective in hubs such as Silicon Valley — so difficult to replicate in impoverished places? And are there any alternative approaches to entrepreneurship that could be more successful in revitalizing local communities?

To explore these questions, we conducted an eight-year investigation of two organizations dedicated to revitalizing Detroit through entrepreneurship. While the two pursued the same goal, they adopted very different approaches. The first organization, which we’ll call ACCEL, was a traditional business accelerator. ACCEL identified ventures with high-growth potential that were likely to attract venture capital investment. It provided mentorship and resources to help them grow as quickly as possible. The second, which we’ll call GREEN, was an alternative incubator. GREEN was founded on a philosophy that business should “grow like a living organism,” and thus encouraged its startups to leverage resources that already existed in the local community to nurture their growth.

To understand the impacts of these two approaches, we took a deep dive into the founding and early-stage development processes of two representative ventures from each organization. We sat in on all of their idea development meetings (a total of 148 meetings) as well as regularly interviewing both founders and mentors for these companies (a total of 67 in-depth interviews). In addition, we traced the subsequent development of all 27 ventures that emerged from the two organizations during our study, analyzing more than 600 news articles about the companies alongside other data sources such as follow-up interviews, company updates, and social media posts.

These detailed analyses helped us identify a key factor that contributes to the limited effectiveness of the Silicon Valley model in impoverished communities: its focus on scaling up, rather than scaling deep. In our study, we borrowed the ecological concept of “scale,” which refers to how an organism grows in both time and space, to understand how different types of entrepreneurial ventures grow. ACCEL, like many entrepreneurship programs designed to maximize financial growth, focused on helping its companies to secure venture capital investment. Because venture capital investors seek maximum returns at minimum costs (that is, in as short a timeframe as possible), these venture-capital-backed companies were strongly incentivized to expand as quickly and as widely as possible. As a result, the founders’ ideas consistently morphed into ventures optimized to grow broadly and quickly — that is, ventures that would scale up.

For example, one of the founders we shadowed originally intended to empower Detroit’s brick-and-mortar fashion retailers by building an online portal for local boutiques. Over the course of her participation in ACCEL, the idea transformed into an e-commerce platform that sold products from nationwide fashion boutiques to nationwide customers. ACCEL mentors would ask her questions such as, “How likely is it that you’ll ever be able to do this with stores nationwide?” In response to pressures like these, the founder dropped some of her venture’s original features, including its online inventory system for Detroit retailers and strategy of collaborating with retailers to host local fashion events. These elements would have helped Detroit’s disadvantaged retailers, but they couldn’t be quickly replicated across the country, and so they were abandoned in favor of a business model that enabled faster, broader growth. Although the move made her company more appealing to investors, the founder felt conflicted, lamenting, “I came here with a big vision. And then it was broken down to pieces and I built something for just one piece.”

Most of the ACCEL ventures went through similar transformations. Their local impact was explosive, but relatively short-lived. While many created substantial local employment opportunities at first, they ultimately tended to leave Detroit for greater access to the capital, talent, and industry-specific knowledge necessary to secure larger rounds of funding. Importantly, this suggests that the problem with the Silicon Valley model isn’t that high-growth entrepreneurship can’t emerge from poor places. Startups that were successful in a traditional sense did emerge from ACCEL, but they failed at making a lasting impact on their local communities because their approach to scaling focused on rapid expansion at all costs — eventually decoupling their success from that of their home regions.

In contrast, GREEN took a markedly different approach to scaling. In our research, we found that GREEN encouraged its founders to develop their ventures through entrepreneurial bricolage — that is, a model where entrepreneurs repurpose and recombine resources that are already available, rather than seeking out funding from external sources. These founders built rich relationships with local partners, and they sought out creative ways to leverage the resources available in their local environments to address urgent, local problems. This meant that their venture ideas became embedded in the Detroit ecosystem, growing deeply and slowly rather than broadly and quickly. We call this scaling deep.

For example, one venture we followed had developed a tool to help seniors manage their medications. Although they initially received an offer from a major pharmacy that would enable them to scale up nationwide, they instead transformed into a design-services firm, applying their core capabilities in eldercare product design to address Detroit-specific issues in collaboration with local hospitals, senior living communities, and insurance companies. Reflecting on this decision, the founder expressed his commitment to a philosophy he called “growth in depth”: “We are not going to be flying all over the country anytime soon,” he explained, “because community work is very localized.” Similarly, another founder joined GREEN hoping to build a plant to recycle waste tires, but ultimately ended up creating a platform that mobilized local residents to collect waste tires in their neighborhoods and worked with local design schools to upcycle the tires into art projects.

These ventures never expanded beyond Detroit, but they successfully implemented customized, location-specific solutions to address location-specific problems. One company alleviated local unemployment by providing more than 200 disadvantaged culinary entrepreneurs with access to licensed kitchen spaces in local churches, fresh ingredients from urban farmers, and local customers through a local farmers’ market. Another addressed the city’s food desert problem by turning corner stores, community centers, local schools, and gas stations into fresh food distribution hubs. As one GREEN founder eloquently described his company’s growth philosophy, “I want us to be like an oak tree that takes all of its energy for the first 20 to 50 years to set deep, deep roots, [and then] produces a lot of deep, rich offspring [and becomes] the anchor of the ecosystem.”

To be clear, founders from both GREEN and ACCEL were motivated by a shared mission of reviving Detroit. But their differing approaches to growth led them to make vastly different impacts. While the ventures that focused on scaling up expanded beyond Detroit to raise investment in their next fundraising rounds, those that scaled deep instead invested in fostering lasting, local relationships, leveraging local resources and solving local problems.

This suggests that it may be time to rethink how we understand entrepreneurship-driven local development. Academics and practitioners alike rightly emphasize the fact that alleviating local poverty requires nurturing ventures that grow. However, a strong focus on how much ventures grow can often obscure critical differences in howventures grow. Our research illustrates that venture-capital-backed, rapid expansion is not the only way to grow — ventures can also grow by deepening local embeddedness, simultaneously feeding on and cultivating local resources.

And they do so at a time when the views and priorities of their employees have shifted. A recent McKinsey study showed that well-being, flexibility, and work-life balance are top of mind. A survey Microsoft conducted  last year indicated that 41% of the global workforce would consider switching jobs in the next year, with 55% noting that work environment would play a role in their decisions.

Our firm was put in a unusual position in 2020: we were hired to design the headquarters of the Korean fintech company Hana Bank during the very period when the pandemic was forcing business leaders to rethink the purpose of the office. But the process — and the resulting building — wasn’t a reaction to Covid. Rather, the crisis highlighted and accelerated trends that had been bubbling under the surface for years, including an increased focus on employee mental and physical health, the needs of a multi-generational workforce, greater emphasis on corporate purpose, and the shift to remote work.

The pandemic raised the stakes for companies looking to retain top-tier employees and build thriving cultures. Here are some of the principles we employed and lessons we took away from the Hana Bank project as well as our recommendations for how organizations can implement both small and large-scale changes in enticing people to return to in-person work,.

Ask what the space is for — and name it accordingly

It might sound simple, but nomenclature matters. For knowledge workers, the office shouldn’t be a place to tackle a to-do list. It’s a place for collaboration, creativity, and learning, where an employee feels nurtured and a sense of belonging. Names of buildings, floors, areas, or rooms should reflect this intent. Terms like “learning center” or “innovation space” communicate the new perspective, shape design changes, attract talent, and influence behavior.

Hana Bank calls its new HQ “Mindmark” to acknowledge the creative work happening inside. Cutting-edge tech companies like Facebook and Google have “campuses” for the same reason; they want their engineers to experiment just as they did when they were students. Even UPS recently renamed its corporate headquarters building — from the Plaza to Casey Hall — as CEO Carol Tome recounts in this HBR article to emphasize a more warm, inviting, collaborative environment.

Listen to what your employees want and need

Think of Covid as a catalyst to talk about what the best employees want from their workplaces, even if you can’t execute on every idea. For most organizations, reverting to the status quo won’t be an option. People will expect more flexibility, better technology, and incentives to come to the office, and companies must heed that call.

Salesforce, for example, reduced its desk space by 40% and embraced a floor plan that features more team-focused spaces that encourage a balance of individual and collaborative work. The Hana Bank HQ caters to various modes of working, including the kind of heads-down individual work that happens at a desk, flexible seating for when people need a break from their desks, collaborative spaces that encourage focused team interaction, and lounges for socializing. This combination of experiences encourages worker agency while still providing structure.

Experiment within your own organization

Some companies will create a new headquarters post-pandemic. But most can design a more thoughtful office environment. To start exploring ideas for your own organization, our recommendation is to start small. Repurpose conference rooms, invest in a new teaming table, or refurbish a floor instead of an entire building. You might also incorporate multimedia technology to bring people together and breathe new life into your office.

WarnerMedia’s new headquarters features an immersive media experience that incorporates content from the company’s vast universe of networks to create a sense of brand identity and community. Many companies have invested in smart hybrid meeting technology as well. Look also for multi-use opportunities. For example, the circuitous indoor/outdoor ramps that stretch from the bottom to the top of the Hana Bank building can be used for one-on-one walking meetings, individual exercise, or social breaks in nature and fresh air. Finally, be sure to focus on safety and sustainability by following healthy building guidelines.

Activate partnerships based on insights

For younger knowledge workers, the office is as much a place to learn and socialize as it is a place to meet deadlines. Nearly 60% of Millennials report that opportunities to discover new insights are extremely important to them when applying for a job, and they may also stay longer at a company if they get involved in social causes. Smart companies make this happen by partnering with outside organizations to provide such programming.

Activities like yoga or meditation, community service, or continuing education are a good place to start. Even small initiatives like a hanging work from local or student artists in rotation, canned food drives in the lobby, or pop-up food trucks outside can fuel employees’ sense of purpose. Gravity — a mixed-use development in Columbus, Ohio, that houses a large-scale creative office building in addition to residences — employs a full-time amenities curator to seek out partners and programs that feed curiosity and build community.

In conclusion

The workplace trends that accelerated and employee preferences that crystallized during the pandemic aren’t going away. We urge corporations to use this moment to think about how they can improve work environments in a way that boosts employee engagement and well-being, thereby encouraging attendance, increasing retention, and attracting new talent. Now is the time to act.

Recently, the phrase, “your job will be posted before your obituary,” went viral. And the sad reality is, it went viral because so many people can relate to the sentiment. 

After more than a year and a half of the coronavirus pandemic, burnout among workers is surging. There are many suggestions for how individuals can cope—from practicing self-care, to using mental health resources provided by employers, to taking the extra vacation time some companies gave their workers this past summer. 

But the truth is, research shows individual actions cannot mitigate organizational factors that lead to burnout and employee loss. The call is coming from inside the house. 

If you’re in a position of leadership, you can seize this time and find ways to make your team feel valued for who they are, not just what they do. Transformative, resilient leaders understand that adversity can provide a rationale to take risks that would otherwise seem unjustifiable—and change a culture in previously unimagined ways.

My mentor, Dr. George S. Everly, has written about what every leader should know regarding crisis and growth. Here, I want to hone in on one of our five pillars of transformative, resilient leadership: building supportive relationships.

Here are the five elements of supportive relationships that transformative leaders should strive to enact in their workplaces:

1. Equanimity

Worker shortages. Childcare issues. Supply chain breakdowns. The list of crises leaders have dealt with in the past few years is overwhelming, yet one of the top things a leader can do for their team is to model composure, calm, and an even temper.

Easier said than done, we know. But demonstrating equanimity reassures your team that you have an objective perspective, and they can trust you with their concerns and problems. Strive to create time in your schedule for your own processing and mental reframing, so you’re not reactive in discussions with your team.

2. Reliability/Trustworthiness

To quote from our book: “Think of reliability as consistency. Consistency yields predictability. Predictability engenders trust. Trust is a key characteristic of high-performing organizations, especially those enduring a crisis.” 

We can boil this down to a few simple, yet powerful, actions:

• Do what you say you’re going to do.
• If you must break a promise, clearly and promptly explain why.
• Show genuine kindness to your team members, both to their faces and behind their backs.

These small actions, over time, foster a workplace that feels reliable and trustworthy, and that has a big effect. According to Paul Zak (2017), people who work in “high trust” organizations have 74 percent less stress, 106 percent more energy, 50 percent higher productivity, 13 percent fewer sick days, 76 percent more interpersonal connectedness, and 29 percent more life satisfaction.

Thousands of businesses changed their business model at the onset of the pandemic, introducing new products or services and embracing new channels to reach their customers. Thousands more launched new businesses altogether, spotting untapped opportunities in our collective “new normal.” 

Now, as we head into 2022, we see the impacts of the past two years crystallizing and new trends emerging, like the beginnings of the metaverse to changing how we define small businesses and how small businesses operate — online, offline and in-between. 

A few weeks ago, I sat down with my colleague Pooja Piyaratna who leads Meta’s Business Product Marketing Group for small businesses. Together, we identified four trends that will reshape the small business landscape in 2022 and beyond.

The evolution of entrepreneurship

One fortunate byproduct of the pandemic was an outpouring of creativity. Around the world, people reexamined previously held assumptions — like the need to conduct some business exclusively in-person — and new, exciting ideas and businesses were born. This effectively redefined what it means to be an entrepreneur, adding more diversity to the small business space. In 2022, this trend will accelerate further as a record number of businesses are forecasted to be started. One of the most interesting evolutions is the increasing frequency we’re seeing creators turn their passion into a living. For example, Emily Delaney, the Cheese Board Queen, started with a humble Instagram showcasing her love of cheese and charcuterie boards in 2019. Now, just three years later, she hosts virtual classes and workshops, partners with brands regularly and has a book coming out with Penguin’s DK Books in the Spring. Her story of sharing a passion online and turning it into a bonafide business is not unique, and one we’ll only see more of in the future.

The art and science of creativity

Over the last two years, small business owners have had no choice but to become increasingly creative with their digital presence. And for many, this opened new doors for driving sales and building their brand in the process. Live Shopping is a great example of a digital technology that has helped businesses showcase their offerings while also infusing their brand’s unique personality into an online experience. And for many, the beauty of fun live video combined with the convenience of online shopping has opened up new revenue streams that will persist beyond the pandemic. 

Consider Illinois boutique owner Kelley Cawley, who credits regular streams on Facebook Live with making her customers more engaged than ever, driving more online and in-person traffic to her store. To make Live Shopping a success, Kelley mixes the art of a fun Live experience with the science of digital tools and insights that help her understand what keeps her customers engaged. In fact, Crawley knows her sales have jumped 88% since she’s implemented the Live Shopping strategy. Combining the art of creativity and the understanding digital tools provide of what drives the most success enables businesses like Crawley’s to experiment, innovate and make strategic decisions based on real data. In 2022, we can expect businesses that have found a home online to experiment further  — combining the art of creativity with data science tools — ultimately discovering the strategies that work best for them.

Messaging paves the way for the next era of communication

Another interesting development is how businesses are using messaging to infuse personalization into their customer communications. People’s preferences for how they want to talk with companies are evolving. In this digital era, 75% of adults globally say they want to communicate with businesses via messaging, in the same way they communicate with friends and family. As we transition from the mobile Internet to the Metaverse, we know we’ll see businesses large and small working with more immersive formats to forge personal connections online. While this may sound far off, the groundwork is already underway. For example, small businesses can now conduct video calls via Messenger, allowing them to speak and see their customer, helping them to answer questions faster, provide better customer service, and of course, truly connect person-to-person.

“Building a real perpetual motion machine is impossible since it would violate the laws of thermodynamics. But when it comes to human motivation, we can have perpetual energy as long as we invest in a sense of connection, meaning, ownership and long-term thinking.” —Dan Ariely, psychologist and author of Payoff

You have likely set, reset, or outright dropped many habit change goals over the years. 

I know I have.

Heading into this week, and into the new year just around the corner, it can be tempting to start what I call “nexting”—overthinking, anticipating, and trying to control some Grand Canyon change result into being.

Losing 30 pounds by summer. Going and staying vegan. Making a million dollars in a side hustle. World domination.

And yet the science is clear that habit change (particularly when facing the nastier changes of dropping long-standing bad habits for less “sexy” healthy alternatives) is much less likely to succeed if people fixate on goals of a big result. For example, research findings described in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology show that peoples’ habits and performance are influenced much more by the environmental contexts they are in than the goals they set for themselves. 

Though goals seem important, the short-sighted, needy human brain loses steam quickly when the dopamine drip is slow going, and when your daily contexts are filled with triggering cues toward competing, “bad” habits, and the Grand Canyon result you desire is a mirage on the horizon. 

David Neal and his colleagues showed in these studies that only when people self-perceive that their habits are guided by goals do these goals seem to have much impact on their performance on memory tasks. 

It’s clear then that you need to focus more on your daily habits than on lofty results we crave. What are the unskillful habits cluttering up your day that are blocking you from the new, higher habits of creating, leading, connecting, and making a lasting impact? You will benefit from careful examination and effort to declutter certain key habits and build new ones into your daily life.

Planning and scheduling small, daily actions in the direction of (versus fixation on) a change goal is the way of a habit change warrior. 

Eat using a smaller plate each day… Eliminate one high-calorie snack item each day this week… Drink 8 glasses of water daily… Reach out to three potential network leads today… Write out, schedule, and track habit change efforts daily.

Specific, small, and daily doings. 

The Grand Canyon itself was forged by the daily flow of water over many years. A habit change goal won’t take millennia, and yet it is daily action that breaks unskillful, career-blocking, or relationship-stalling habits. It is daily change effort that builds new, higher, effective habits. It is daily action that builds our character, the identity radiating out to others in the world.

And speaking of water, I view mindfulness practice as the core habit that, like water, creates the flexibility and flow needed for changing and building habits. Like water, mindfulness is the universal “solvent” that melts the unskillful habits you have cluttering up your professional and personal life. Mindfulness is the awareness that sees clearly—that feels the discomfort of change with patient, kind abiding. Mindfulness sees the goal and, consistent with research, sees the step to take now. Mindfulness moves without the nexting our fixated, over-anticipating minds incline us toward.

So, as you head deeper into the holidays, consider your Grand Canyon hopes and see about (mindfully) making them into daily footsteps on a daily change path. 2022 will arrive. Decisions in the here and now, mindfully made, determine much of what those first intrepid steps into the new year will look like.

Hurry Up and Sit There

Your “nexting” mind-habit will have you react on impulse, often unskillfully. This only reinforces and adds to your habit clutter. When feeling a strong impulse, instead:

1. Pause and close your eyes, bringing attention to the sensations in your body. 
2. When the impulse to rush into action returns, wait a bit more, sit and notice more sensations, even thoughts showing up. 
3. Listen to your body and mind and wonder whether the rush serves or takes from you.

Pronouns have long been at the crux of heated debate and social reform—not only in terms of how we express gender, but also how our usage reveals how we relate to one another. 

In looking at pronoun choice in a variety of high-stakes contexts, psychologists and linguists have discovered that our pronoun patterns reveal a lot about how we express power and social status. 

The Pronouns of a Leader

Looking at the way pronouns pattern in the speech of higher status vs. lower status participants in interactions, particularly those in an employment context, psychologist James Pennebaker and his colleagues found that those who took on leadership roles used fewer first-person singular words (I, me, my) and more plural words (we, our, they), while those in subordinate roles used I-words more.

This may at first seem surprising, as using “I” might seem to be the ultimate power word—as in “I expect” or “I need.” But as anyone trying to effectively parent or supervise has learned, telling someone what they need to do by couching in it terms of what you want rarely works. Instead, to build a team, to motivate people, you have to convince people you are in it together and that it benefits them as well as you. So, welcome to the world of “we” and “us,” rather than “I.”

Political Pronouns

Since using “we” more than “I” seems to carry with it a sense of collective experience and a correlation with leadership, politicians have, not surprisingly, jumped quickly on that rhetorical bandwagon. 

A study that examined campaign speeches of Australian Prime Ministerial candidates found that the candidates who were victorious used more inclusive “we” and “us” pronouns than those who lost in 80 percent of all elections. What’s more, a series of data analyses for the “Language Log” blog run by the University of Pennsylvania Professor Mark Liberman found that there has been a clear increase in second person plural pronoun usage across presidential State of the Union addresses since World War II.

This research suggests that we prefer leaders whose linguistic behavior indicates that they see themselves as “one of us” and socially identify as part of a collective rather than those who set themselves apart through the use of self-referring pronouns. However, this bent toward preferring political leaders who prioritize social connectedness rather than exceptionality and unique experience does not seem to have always been the case, with this increasing preference for use of inclusive “we” and “us” found only in presidential speeches over the last century.

So the “I”s Don’t Have It?

Of course, first-person pronoun use (e.g., I or me) is not negative; it may simply reflect a status difference or an awareness of the language that is appropriate to get things done in different contexts. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be aware of how our use of pronouns comes across.

When I ask my undergraduate students at Brandeis what they hope for in their future jobs, their answers typically involve making an impact. They have big, sometimes revolutionary, ideas around how to address climate change and social justice issues. They talk about ways we can improve our efficiency by updating outdated communication systems, and even pitch solutions that could help big corporations market their products to younger consumers. But most of all, they are excited to put their pitches into practice — that is, until they get their first jobs and realize they have much less power than they had imagined.

I feel for them, and for anyone making their way into the corporate world for the very first time. It’s not easy to turn an idea into a reality, especially when you are in an entry-level role with limited resources and connections. The people who do have the power to make big decisions often have their own beliefs and assumptions about how to do business based on what has, and has not, worked in the past. If those people are not on your side, they can present you with some serious roadblocks.

So, how do you work around them and get your big ideas noticed, especially as a young person in the workforce?

I’ll tell you what I tell my students: You don’t. You work with them. To make a real impact, you need to get the right people — people with decision-making power — to listen and believe in you.

Here’s how.

First, figure out who holds the power to implement your idea.

Before you pitch your idea, ask yourself: Who has the power to decide whether or not it will be implemented, and what they will base their decision on?

Sometimes this question will be easier to answer than others, depending on what kind of company you work at. Organizations with a clear, hierarchical structure are more likely to have a well-defined process around who needs to approve an idea before it is executed. But organizations with a flat structure, in which there is no real “person in charge” at each level, can be more difficult to navigate.

Take the time to study these dynamics at your own company. There are a few tools you can use to help you diagnose who holds the ultimate decision-making power. One of the most common is called a RACI matrix. The acronym “RACI” stands for the four roles people usually play on a team or project. Here’s a simple breakdown:

• Responsible: the people who are in charge of completing tasks or reaching an objective.
• Accountable: the person who must sign off on the work of the group mentioned above, and give final approval.
• Consulted: the people who need to give input in order for the group in charge of completing tasks to do their work.
• Informed: the people who need to be updated on the status of the project and the decisions that are being made.

Creating this matrix will help you clarify the roles and responsibilities at each level of your organization. Most likely, the person you identify as “accountable” is the one who will say ultimately say “yes” or “no” to your idea.

Note that it’s rare for one person to have all the deciding power. More likely, it will be broken up among different leaders who are accountable for different teams, projects, or people.

For example, let’s say you have a fresh idea around how to engage a new audience for a particular marketing campaign. It may be easiest (and fastest) to look for the person who drives your overall engagement strategy. This could be the leader of the marketing division, or someone who works closely under them. Using the RACI matrix, you may discover that this person makes the final decisions on engagement initiatives, but also relies heavily on specific members of their leadership team for input, and considers market data before making big decisions.

Whatever team, project, or division your idea falls under, get to know what leaders are involved in those areas of your company, and ask around to learn about what factors they consider when making choices.

Choose your champion.

Even after you identify the decision-maker, it’s unlikely that you will get direct access to them. Few young professionals have the social capital to get their ideas immediately noticed by the right people. That’s why you need a champion — someone to advocate for your idea in the high-level meetings and discussions that you probably won’t be invited to.

Picking the right champion will depend on the magnitude of your idea. If it’s a smaller idea, or one that won’t cause significant disruption (like experimenting with a social media post, or reaching out to a new type of client), you might be able to find a champion who has the direct power to put your idea into motion. But if your idea is more disruptive (updating an age-old business model or restructuring a team’s entire workflow), you might need to find a different kind of champion: someone who has acquired a level of informal power that allows them to exert influence over those who are formally in charge.

Take the previous example of engaging a new audience for a marketing campaign. Your champion might be the chief of staff to the head of the marketing division. While this person won’t have direct decision-making power, they still have influence over the person who does.

That said, before bringing your big idea to a champion, you first need to build a foundation of trust with them. This will take time, and it will need to be developed over a series of projects in which you prove your ability to pitch good ideas, provide evidence that give those ideas merit, and consistently follow through on your assignments or tasks. You need your champion to to respect you as a professional, and believe you are credible if you want them to be your advocate.

To fast-track your relationship, study and analyze your champion’s management style. Then adapt your ways of working to fit their style. By doing so, you will increase the odds of producing work they are aligned with and proud of. When they speak, listen with intention, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Proactively set up feedback sessions with your champion and leverage this feedback into clear goals for improvement.

Do your homework.

Once you build that foundation of trust with your champion, you may feel ready to share your big idea. But wait. It’s critical to stress-test the idea first. This process will allow you to create a more robust and thorough pitch with fewer holes and logic gaps.

Start by gathering feedback from various stakeholders. A stakeholder could be someone directly involved in the decision-making process (who you identified earlier using the RACI matrix), or someone in your organization whose work might be directly impacted by your idea.

Sticking with our previous example, a key stakeholder might be the head of sales. Although the head of sales does not influence decision-making within the marketing division, they may be able to provide you with a perspective you had not considered before, especially if your marketing and sales teams work closely together. Another stakeholder might be a trusted peer or manager on the marketing team whose responsibilities may shift should your idea be implemented. This person may raise or problem or concern you can now address.

Stakeholders often have access to critical information that can strengthen your pitch. Connecting with them can also help you develop advocates throughout the organization.

Over the years, Insider has spoken to current and former Googlers about how to land a role. They say being a good collaborator and being curious are some of the traits the company values.

But you also need to make sure your resume stands out. Ahead of the deadline for the new internships, two recruiters from Google’s university programs team — Katarzyna Kamińska, university programs specialist, and Emily Salkey, program manager for talent outreach — hosted a panel at the recent Black Tech Fest on October 19, which was run by the non-profit Colorintech.

They shared tips on how graduates should structure their resumes.

Past experience is a “must have” 

Keep in mind that recruiters are looking for specific information, most notably your past experience, Kamińska said.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to have lots of internships or formal work experience.

“Experience can come in many forms and we are absolutely aware of that,” she said. 

If you’re applying for tech positions, for example, recruiters need to see your knowledge of programming languages. Relevant computer science projects, student activities, research you’ve participated in, hackathons, or class projects could all count, she said.  

You should also include your education, and date of graduation.

“If you’re still studying and don’t yet have a date, you can include the ‘expected date’ of graduation,” she said.

There is no perfect format

A recruiter has around 30 to 40 seconds to look at your resume, so make sure that it is clear and concise, Kamińska said. She recommended a PDF of no more than two pages.

As for the exact format, “there is no one template that Google would encourage applicants to use,” she said. Use whatever template you’re comfortable with, as long as it can convey the key information quickly. 

Showcase your transferable skills

It’s good to show what type of person you are, Kamińska said — so include volunteering experience, awards, or transferable skills you’re particularly proud of. 

Transferable skills can be ones from past jobs, volunteering hobbies, or elsewhere, Kamińska said.

“As an example, if you are working in retail, you can basically think about what you have learned and how you can utilize this in your role at Google,” she said.

Click Read More for the full Article on Business Insider.

Yes, there are life or death situations where there is tremendous pressure to succeed. Think about a surgeon performing emergency surgery. But even then, you mustn’t believe that there is no room for failure in your life. There is a danger that this mindset could stop you from making sense of success.

Success becomes less enjoyable when you are constantly looking over your shoulder and trying to avoid failure. You stop appreciating the grind since all you care about is the end goal.

While this all-or-nothing mindset may seem inspiring from the outside, the reality is that it can take a real toll on you and hold back your potential. Let’s explore its potential impact and how embracing your failures can help you deal with them.

1. Perfectionism

It is natural to obsess over every minute detail when you keep telling yourself that there is no room for failure. You become worried that even the slightest mistake could cost you. This often leads to micromanaging, decision paralysis, unhealthy work culture, lengthy approval cycles and cost pile-ups.

When you are prepared to embrace failure, you are less likely to obsess over every detail or intervene in matters beyond your station. As a leader, you start trusting others more. And decision-making becomes more decentralized, thus enabling your team to be much more proactive and responsive. 

2. Experimentation 

There is very little room for experimentation when you are not ready to accept the possibility of it failing. Spending time and resources on something new may not be viewed as viable. You would instead stick to the tried and tested ways since they are almost guaranteed to succeed. This kind of short-termism can stunt your growth, see you lose your first-mover advantage and cause market failure.

If you can set aside your fear of failure and conduct well-thought-out experiments, you stand to gain valuable new insights that none of your competitors might have. More importantly, it can help you make data-driven decisions and forecasts, and stop you from making investment decisions that are not in sync with the market conditions.

3. Blame culture

Blame culture is a by-product of a lack of failure tolerance. You start believing mistakes and errors are unforgivable and that there is nothing more shameful than failing. Your focus tends to be on finding out who is to be blamed for the mistake, rather than what caused it. More often than not, the corrective action will see the blame being apportioned to someone, but the underlying problem stays unresolved. This sort of half-baked approach will hamper productivity and also adversely affect morale.

Examining failure is a tough job, whether it is yours or your team’s. Apart from dealing with personal insecurities and jilted egos, you will have to call into question the effectiveness of long-followed processes and procedures. This is only possible when you are failure tolerant. It allows you to confront the problem scientifically and transparently. And only then would you be able to quickly identify the root causes and work towards fixing them.

t’s one thing to start a business as a solopreneur. Having a couple clients here and there is great, but it’s something different to grow that business into a revenue-generating machine that allows you to do what you love and earn the kind of money you need on a full-time basis.

Being a successful solopreneur requires planning, follow through, and having reliable partners and services like VSP® Individual Vision Plans on your side. Here are five tips that growth-focused solopreneurs should keep in mind to set themselves up for long-term success.

1. Stay organized.

To go from part-time to full-time solopreneur, you’re going to have to put in a lot of extra hours. But you want to be working smarter, not just longer.

You’re in charge of your time and how many clients you take on in that time. Therefore, staying organized will be a top priority. You’ll want to avoid downtime and double booking as much as possible.

There are plenty of scheduling apps to help keep business owners organized and on time. You might even consider adding an online calendar or scheduling tool to your business’s website so clients easily know your availability. Staying organized will help you avoid burnout which can be crucial when starting out on your own.

2. Know how much money you need to get by.

Going full-time with your solo venture means it will likely be your sole source of income. You can’t just quit your nine-to-five job and “wing it” with your startup. That’s how ambitious solopreneurs wind up becoming saddled with debt.

You’ll want to map out every business expense you have now and can foresee in the future from the start. First, consider how much money you’ll need to start your business. This includes upfront costs like purchasing equipment or tools as well as ongoing expenses like renting a space or buying supplies.

Then it’s time to map that budget for your life expenses. How much do you need for rent/mortgage payments? Utilities? Food? Entertainment? You get the idea. Once you have a sense of your personal expense budget, you’ll need to balance it against your projected business income. How much should a typical client/project pay? This should help give you an idea about how many clients you’ll need to safely cover all your expenses plus profit.

3. Have a financial safety net.

Now that you’ve determined where you want to be financially, don’t forget to plan for the unexpected. People get sick. Cars and equipment break down. Things like the economy and weather can impact demand for your services or the ability of your clients to pay on time.

Since you’re the nexus of your business, having extra money on-hand for emergencies will help ensure your long-term success. One way is to put a certain percent of your profits every month into a separate account. That specific amount is up to you. It’s often wise to have enough money in that account for you to get by for six months to a year or more, depending on the circumstances that arise.

4. Know the risks.

There are additional ways a solopreneur can protect themselves against certain unforeseen events. What happens if you damage a client’s property while on the job? What happens when a client claims negligence on your part? As a solopreneur, you’re open to a wide array of risks.

This is where liability insurance comes in. A general liability policy can help cover expenses related to physical incidents such as bodily injuries or property damage. Professional liability insurance typically covers risks like errors or omissions in your work. You’ll be relieved to have this type of insurance should you ever need it.

5. Don’t forget to protect yourself.

Since we’re on the topic of insurance, solopreneurs need to protect their most valuable asset: themselves.

“There is no such thing as a conflict-free team, and you don’t want a conflict-free team,” explained Amy Gallo, author of the HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict (Harvard Business Review Press, 2017). “Disagreements over how the work should be done, what the goal of the work is or how we measure success” help lead to innovative ideas and even bonding between team members, she said.

However, personality conflict is different. When team members can’t seem to get along, that’s a whole different ball game. But as a manager, you should expect that this conflict will happen. 

And once you’ve helped the team figure out how to work well together, be ready to start the process over again when new members come on board. “The reality is that many managers are managing teams that are fluid, given the way teams work now,” Gallo noted. “It’s rare that a manager will have five people on their team and that’s it. New people are staffed for projects, or managers are [put in charge of] a peer for a while because of the nature of special projects.” 

As the team’s leader, it’s up to you to ensure that conflict on your team is dealt with. But that doesn’t mean you’re the one who should be squashing it. 

Avoid Playing Referee

“It’s best for conflict to be handled between the two people having it as much as possible,” Gallo advised. “As a manager, you have to be firm about when you step in. Oftentimes people will expect you to do that over and over if you start playing referee instead of manager.”

To avoid becoming a referee, encourage your team members to work out their differences on their own. But be ready to get involved. One instance where you might have to step in is if conflict has become noticeable to you or other team members, but the involved parties don’t recognize there’s an issue or won’t take the initiative to solve it on their own. “Often, the first step is simply informing them, separately and privately, that their conflict is noticeable and affects the workplace,” explained Andrey Doichev, founder of Inc and Go, a company that streamlines the legal process of setting up a business. 

Next, whether you’ve initiated the conversation or one or both conflicting team members have come to you, consider exactly how involved you want to get. For Gallo, it’s about being a supportive and available coaching resource for employees as they work to squash the beef on their own.

If you use a coaching approach, consider helping the involved parties develop empathy for each other. Ask what they think might be going on with the other person, what they might want out of the situation and to try putting themselves in the other person’s shoes. Then you can help them brainstorm potential solutions.

Some conflicts demand a manager’s involvement. If you find out that something inappropriate has happened—anything from harassment to a team member lying about work—”you have to call those behaviors out,” Gallo said. It’s best to do this privately.

Preventing Conflict in the First Place

Overall, though, the best way that managers can handle conflict on their team is to prevent it.

It can be tempting to hire people who are similar. It might seem like a homogenous approach can help prevent conflict. But the lack of diversity can itself be problematic.

Instead, “consider how someone has resolved conflict in the past. One interview question could be, ‘Describe a conflict you’ve had with a co-worker. How did you resolve it?’ ” Gallo said. “It should give insight into how they think about conflict and getting past it.”

Next, tell your team that conflict is natural and expected, but so is a professional resolution of it. This is a great time to set boundaries around how you will and won’t get involved with conflict. Explain that you expect the team to resolve it among themselves but be clear that you’re available to help coach them through it.

However, servant leadership is a style of leadership that has been gaining popularity because it sees people’s needs as the end in itself. Servant leadership does not expect any outcome other than simply fulling the needs of people. It is implied that serving them will only do well for them.

Servant leadership today

Servant leadership is not only found in theory anymore. Researchers have shifted their studies to empirically verifiable research findings. Many researchers have also been successful in almost accurately predicting the impact and benefits of the servant leadership approach when applied. It is easier to observe and evaluate how effective servant leadership leads to specific outcomes with such findings.

Organizations around the world are directing their focus towards helping people grow and focus. Furthermore, the motivation of those in leadership positions is aligned to serve others, not just to lead, as almost every stakeholder in an institution has access to all information with the click of a button. The days when leadership and data were preserved for the few elites are bygone.

In the organizational sense, servant leadership empowers the subordinates to become leaders in their units. The competitive future belongs to those leaders and organizations, which will have everyone on board empowered to identify and resolve the organization’s problems. It awards organizational citizenship through servant leadership — this means that for employees to show altruism and go beyond their call of duty, the servant leader must empower each of them to feel like a significant member. This is only achievable when the leadership of an organization is concerned with the holistic well-being and growth of everyone.

Job performance is the aggregate of the contribution of all the individuals to the organizational goal over time. It could be task performance or contextual performance. Task performance contributes to goods and services, and it is relatively easy to measure and monitor. On the other hand, contextual performance involves interpersonal and voluntary activities, which help an organization achieve its core goals in a broader context. Contextual organizational goals can only be achieved with a united team of empowered staff and an environment that focuses on the staff members’ holistic welfare.

Globalization has shrunk the world into one village. Different cultures and norms now influence one another across continents. Multinationals are exporting best practices while at the same time learning from their host communities. The vibrant human rights movements across the world have shifted the focus to human needs. In this competitive 21^st century, the institutions that will survive are those willing to embrace change and have servant leadership at the core of their organizational structure. However, labor unions, past management and leadership styles based on command, prestige and authority will cease to survive.

How servant leadership will change the world

Promoters and practitioners of servant leadership suggest that once servant leadership is internalized and lived to its tenets, the fruits of successful servant leadership will manifest in every aspect of society through most of the various attributes enumerated by scholars. Everyone will listen and be listened to; hence there will be little or no misunderstandings. This will help in the pursuit of building a united, cohesive community that confronts common challenges in unison. As such, society will be more empathetic, resulting in a more committed society to the growth of every member.

For anyone who doubted, the data is in. The Great Resignation is real and it’s happening. The U.S. Department of Labor reports that during the months of April, May, and June 2021 a total of 11.5 million workers quit their jobs. And it’s not over. According to Gallup research, 48 percent of employees are actively looking to make a change, and according to Personio research, nearly 1:4 will do so in the next six months. Those looking for new opportunities will find ripe opportunities; in June the U.S. hit an all-time high of 10.1 million job openings.

What does this all mean to your organization? You are likely juggling two pressing needs: hiring to backfill people who have left and hiring new people to support business growth. The scarcity is real — too few people for too many jobs. The imbalance of this supply-demand highlights more than ever that productivity is about people.

The best way to stabilize your business is to stem the tsunami of attrition and increase your retention. In the frantic need to hire more people, the group we often forget to attend to are the folks who stay — those showing up day-in and day-out shouldering the work that needs to get done. Think about what these people — the ones who are here, working for and with you — need now. The short answer is they need to be seen for who they are and what they are contributing. It’s your job as the leader to make sure they’re getting the recognition they deserve.

And we get it: As employers, leaders, managers, and HR professionals, you’ve been dealing with a lot of uncertainty and change. You have a lot on your plate. Not having the right people in the right quantities in the right seats to get the work done creates a hamster-wheel effect — you keep running, faster and faster, exhausted with forces outside your control. So let’s control what you can control, and that is you. If you want to stem the rate of turnover in your organization or team, you must look inside yourself and decide what is possible. So, let’s stick our finger in that proverbial hamster wheel and make it stop for a minute. Let’s pause and see what is possible, what you can do to make a difference.

Here are four steps leaders can take now to best navigate the Great Resignation:

1. Be aware of your impact.

As leaders, people are watching you all the time whether you realize it or not. So, pause and consider how you are showing up in both your words and your actions. Let’s say your company is experiencing record YTD turnover of 25% and hiring is falling 60% below target (real scenarios in far too many companies). Your people are worried and stressed. How do you message the realities of these pain points to your people? Are you aware of how your own concerns and frustrations are experienced by others? Are you unintentionally adding to their fear and uncertainty? When you become aware of your impact, you can control it and steer it in the right direction.

2. Focus on potential and possibility.  

On the flip side, let’s say your organization has 75% retention and you have attracted and welcomed a large number of new people to the organization. Consider what outcome you want to create out of this uniquely disruptive time. This is a time to be grounded in pragmatism blended with possibility, gratitude, and recognition of what your people, old and new, are going through. Get curious and ask:

• What do you envision as the best possible outcome for this situation?
• What excites you about that?
• What does that give you/the team/the organization?

When you communicate to your people in this way, the impact is one of potential and possibility instead of fear and uncertainty.

3. Make it okay to leave.

Speaking about communication, let’s look at one other area where you may be creating an unintended impact — how you and others in the organization treat people when they leave.

In far too many companies, when an employee gives notice the reaction is akin to an emotional breakup — you’ve been left and you feel rejected. This triggers some not great behavior like a tendency to make the person leaving “wrong” and doubt their trustworthiness or integrity — even though that was not the case before they gave notice. There is a penchant to dismiss their presence and devalue their contribution. Think deeply about what this type of behavior signals to the departing employee and remember, those that remain and are watching.

An alternative is to approach these transitions with gratitude. It’s helpful to realize the era of lifelong employment is over and with rare exception, your employees are with your organization as a pit stop on their career journey. They’ve contributed and hopefully, they’ve learned some new things. They are not the same person they were when they joined and the same goes for you and for the organization. What would it be like to pause when a resignation occurs and give voice to these things from both sides of the relationship? What would be created if you paused to acknowledge how both sides of the relationship have grown and evolved? Rather than viewing a resignation as a rejection of the relationship, what could be possible if you began to view it as an inflection point in its evolution?

The talent pool is tight, and careers are long. End this phase of your time together with appreciation.

4. Give your employees the respect and attention they deserve

The marketplace for talent has shifted. You need to think of your employees like customers and put thoughtful attention into retaining them. This is the first step to slow attrition and regain your growth curve. And this does not happen when they feel ignored in the fever to hire new people or underappreciated for the effort they make to keep business moving forward. You cannot take your people for granted and expect them to stay — healthy relationships do not work that way. Here are three steps:

Re-recruit them. 

Consider what conversations would be like if you were recruiting them to your company.

• Spend time to understand their motivations and ambitions. With so much new hiring happening, identify where opportunities might exist inside the organization (even if it is outside of your team) to help them fulfill unrealized dreams and ambitions.
• Help them see and claim the positive impact they are making in the organization. Acknowledge not just what they are doing, but why it matters. Let them know what you appreciate about how they are showing up during difficult times. People want to know they are making a difference.
• Don’t stop. These are not one-time conversations. You can’t just wade in, have a talk, and think all is good. This should be the primary focus of each manager and leader in your company.

Reward them.

This may ignite the need for a systemic look at how and what is recognized and rewarded in your organization. Now may be the time to challenge the status quo if what you are seeing from your people and hearing from the talent marketplace is misaligned to your company’s current reality. This is not just about paying people more — research tells us the motivational effect of pay raises is short-lived. Just as important is how you recognize and value the contributions and impact of your people.

• Think about the DNA of your organization. If the old ways of doing things no longer serve the organization and its people, figure out what does.
• Be willing to let go of the past … it’s gone.
• Play the long game here. Be sure your company’s compensation philosophy is clear and understood by all. (That starts with you.) Make sure accountability is in place so that those current employees are not shorted when new people are hired.

Equity starts in how you value contribution. You may not be the only one in your organization to fix the myriad of issues linked to recognition and rewarding your people, but you can lead. You can give voice to the issues and advocate for accountability.

Engage them. 

Businesses are hurting and at the root of that pain for many today is a shortage of people to do the work. Your existing people feel that pain as they extend themselves to pick-up extra shifts to provide coverage, listen to customer complaints when they are helpless to fix the real issue, or witness one more colleague call it “quits” when their tipping point is reached. So, be bold and engage your people in helping you solve problems.

• Ask for their help. This requires courage because admitting that you do not know all the answers is vulnerable work. It takes strength and confidence to appreciate that outcomes are better when more ideas are included, when fuller representation is present and diverse perspectives are heard.
• Give them agency to help mitigate the day-to-day concerns they are faced with. Create space for them to step up, participate and inform the way forward. This sends the crucial message that they are trusted and valued.
• Focus on the desired outcome. Actively seek the insights of diverse voices and points of view into what will help achieve it, especially insights and ideas different than your own. Remain open to being surprised and delighted.

Many of us believe that unexpected events or shocks create fertile conditions for major life and career changes by sparking us to reflect about our desires and priorities. That holds true for the coronavirus pandemic. A bit over a year ago, when I asked people in an online poll to tell me how the pandemic had affected their plans for career change, 49% chose this response: “It has given me downtime to rest and/or think.”

That’s a good start. But if there is one thing I have learned from decades of studying successful career change, it’s that thinking on its own is far from sufficient. We rarely think our way into a new way of acting. Rather, we act our way into new ways of thinking — and being.

Yes, events that disrupt our habitual routines have the potential to catalyze real change. They give us a chance to experiment with new activities and to create and renew connections. Even in the seemingly “unproductive” time we spend away from our everyday work lives, we conduct important inner business — asking the big existential questions, remembering what makes us happy, shoring up the strength to make difficult choices, consolidating our sense of self, and more.

Enough has happened during this past year to make many of us keenly aware of what we no longer want. But the problem is this: More appealing, feasible alternatives have yet to materialize. So we’re stuck in limbo between old and new. And now, with most Covid restrictions at last falling away and a return to the office imminent, we confront a real danger: getting sucked back into our former jobs and ways of working.

How can those of us who want to make a career transition avoid that? How can we make progress toward our goals by building on what we’ve learned this past year?

Research on the transformative potential of a catalyzing event like the coronavirus pandemic suggests that we are more likely to make lasting change when we actively engage in a three-part cycle of transition — one that gets us to focus on separation, liminality, and reintegration. Let’s consider each of those parts of the cycle in detail.

The Benefits of Separation

“I spent lockdown in this idyllic, secluded environment,” I was told by John, a businessman whose last executive role came to an end around the onset of the pandemic, enabling him to move out into the country. “I got to see the spring come and go,” he said. “I got to see a lot of nature. It was just an amazingly peaceful backdrop. I got married last year, so my wife and I had an enormous amount of time together. My son, from whom I’d been estranged, came to stay with us. So I got to know him again, which was a great experience. This was a very blessed period.”

John’s experience wasn’t unique. Research on how moving can facilitate behavior change suggests that people who found a new and different place to live during the pandemic may now have better chances of making life changes that stick. Why? Because of what’s known as “habit discontinuity.” We are all more malleable when separated from the people and places that trigger old habits and old selves.

Change always starts with separation. Even in some of the ultimate forms of identity change — brainwashing, de-indoctrinating terrorists, or rehabilitating substance abusers — the standard operating practice is to separate subjects from everybody who knew them previously, and to deprive them of a grounding in their old identities. This separation dynamic explains why young adults change when they go away to college.

My recent research has shown how much our work networks are prone to the “narcissistic and lazy” bias. The idea is this: We are drawn spontaneously to, and maintain contact with, people who are similar to us (we’re narcissistic), and we get to know and like people whose proximity makes it easy for use to get to know and like them (we’re lazy).

The pandemic disrupted at least physical proximity for most of us. But that might not be enough — particularly as we rush back into our offices, travel schedules and social lives — to mitigate the powerful similarities that the narcissistic and lazy bias create for us at work. That’s why maintaining some degree of separation from the network of relationships that defined our former professional lives can be vital to our reinvention.

Tammy English, of Washington University, and Laura Carstensen, of Stanford University, found that the size of people’s networks shrank after the age of 60, not because these people had fewer opportunities to connect but because, increasingly, they perceived time as being limited, which made them more selective. Quite possibly many of our experiences of the pandemic, like John’s, will foster our reinvention by encouraging greater selectivity in how and with whom we spend our limited time.

Liminal Learnings

When the pandemic hit, Sophie, a former lawyer, was transitioning out of a two-decade career and found herself wanting to explore a range of new work possibilities, among them documentary filmmaking, journalism, non-executive board roles, and sustainability consulting. Lockdown created a liminal time and space, a “betwixt and between” zone, in which the normal rules that governed Sophie’s professional life were temporarily lifted, and she felt able to experiment with all sorts of work and leisure pursuits without committing to any of them. She made the most of that period — taking several courses, working on start-up ideas, doing freelance consulting, joining a nonprofit board, and producing two of her first short films.

Taking advantage of liminal interludes allows us to experiment — to do new and different things with new and different people. In turn, that affords us rare opportunities to learn about ourselves and to cultivate new knowledge, skills, resources and relationships. But these interludes don’t last forever. At some point, we have to cull learning from our experiments and use it to take some informed next steps in our plans for career change. What is worth pursuing further? What new interest has cropped up that’s worth a look? What will you drop having learned that it’s not so appealing after all? What do you keep, but only as a hobby?

When Sophie took stock, she was surprised to realize that she hadn’t grown in her board role as much as she had expected, whereas she had very quickly started to build meaningful connections linked to the film industry. These were vital recognitions for her to make before she committed herself to next steps in her transition plan.

Reintegration: A Time for New Beginnings

Most of the executives and professionals with whom I have exchanged pandemic experiences tell me that they do not want to return to hectic travel schedules or long hours that sacrifice time with their families — but are nonetheless worried that they will.

They are right to be worried, because external shocks rarely produce lasting change. The more typical pattern after we receive some kind of wake-up call is simply to revert back to form once things return to “normal.” That’s what the Wharton professor Alexandra Michel found in 2016, when she investigated the physical consequences of overwork for four cohorts of investment bankers over a 12-year period.For these people, avoiding unsustainable work habits required more than changing jobs or even occupations. Many of them had physical breakdowns even after moving into organizations that were supposedly less work-intensive. Why? Because they had actually moved into similarly demanding positions, but without taking sufficient time in between roles to convalesce and gain psychological distance from their hard-driving selves.

Our ability to take advantage of habit discontinuity depends on what we do in the narrow window of opportunity that opens up after routine-busting changes. One study has found, for example, that the window of opportunity for engaging in more environmentally sustainable behaviors lasts up to three months after people move house. Similarly, research on the “fresh start” effect shows that while people experience heightened goal-oriented motivation upon after returning to work from a holiday, this motivation peaks on the first day back and declines rapidly thereafter.

The hybrid working environments with which many organizations are currently experimenting represent a possible new window of opportunity for many people hoping to make a career change, one in which the absence of old cues and the need to make conscious choices provides an opportunity to implement new goals and intentions. If you’re one of these people, it’s now up to you to decide whether you will use this period to effect real career change — or whether, instead, you’ll drift back into your old job and patterns as if nothing ever happened.

Kellogg professors Loran Nordgren and David Schonthal, see this as the perfect analogy for how innovations do, or do not, hit their targets. There’s the fuel of the new product or idea—the compelling features meant to draw people in—but there are also frictions to be considered—the sticking points that make people less likely to adopt something new.

Yet, they say, most innovators think only about fuel and ignore friction.

“We instinctively believe that the way to get people to say yes to our ideas is to add value, to use fuel,” explains Nordgren, a professor of management and organizations. “We often neglect the other side of the equation: the friction that opposes change. Ignoring frictions when pursuing ideas would be like building an airplane and caring only about engines and not aerodynamics.”

Nordgren and Schonthal are authors of the forthcoming book The Human Element, which lays out a framework for how to identify and then tackle the frictions that may be hindering adoption of your innovations. They discussed their framework in a recent The Insightful Leader Live webinar.

There are four basic dimensions to a new idea—each of which has a corresponding friction. Innovators should consider all four of these frictions when launching something new. To explain them, the professors offered a case study of a home-building company.

The company built 1,000 homes for empty nesters who wanted to downsize. Lots of people came to tour the homes, with large percentages of visitors putting down five percent earnest money.

Great news, right? It sure seemed like a good idea with a compelling value proposition.

“And then something really weird happened,” explains Schonthal, a clinical professor of innovation and entrepreneurship. A large portion of the people who put money down “walked away from the deal, in some cases leaving their earnest money on the table.”

Why? Here’s where those four types of frictions come in.

• Inertia: Does the idea represent a major change?
  For these older customers, this new home definitely represented a major change. For example, they wouldn’t know their new neighbors or neighborhood well.

• Effort: What is the cost of implementation?
  The cost is likely pretty high. Customers need to spiff up their old home to get it ready to sell, hire movers, and maybe store some of their furniture that won’t fit in the new place.

• Reactance: Does the audience feel pressured to change?
  Maybe the potential buyers’ adult children are encouraging them to move, or they’ve had some medical problems that are making them consider leaving their long-time home earlier than expected.

• Emotion: What negative feelings might the idea produce?
  There are, of course, lots of emotions tied up in a home and in the realities of aging. Indeed, once the home builder started talking to potential customers, they realized just how emotional some aspects of the move really were.

“They just couldn’t figure out what to do with all their old stuff; in particular, what were they going to do with the dining room table?” Schonthal explains. “The dining-room table is a talisman. It is an artifact that embodies all of these good family memories.”

After identifying all of these frictions, the home builder made some changes. They offered help staging customers’ homes for sale, they included moving and storage services, and, to address the all-important issue of the dining-room table, they moved a wall to create a bigger room.

This increased the cost of the condos, but customers were happy to pay extra. The enlarged dining room alone increased sales by a significant amount.

The lesson: “Removing friction is often more powerful than increasing fuel,” Schonthal says.

The professors’ book offers techniques for digging into these four frictions to get beneath the surface and truly understand why your audience might be resistant.

“You’re like a detective,” Nordgren says. “You’re analyzing the circumstances to understand the specific frictions operating against you. And once you identify those frictions, in many cases the solutions become self-evident.”

This approach works across cultures, they say. And it works for innovators of all types—whether you’re advocating for a new product, a departmental restructuring, or a social movement.

“The ideas here apply to change of really any form,” Schonthal says, “anyone who’s trying to bring something new into the world.”

“I realize my boundaries are blurred, but I don’t know how to handle everything on my plate. There is a lot to do and a lot to take care of … The team looks for so much in terms of guidance, direction, energy, ideas, structure … I feel like I am carrying the weight of it all.” 

We all struggle with stress, anxiety, and other difficult emotions. But it can be tough to figure out what to do with these feelings, especially if we’re the ones who are supposed to be leading and supporting others. What’s the best way for a leader to handle their own emotional struggles at work?

To explore this question, we invited 30 leaders from the US and UK to keep journals for four weeks in May and June of 2020. The leaders were from a variety of global corporations, national and international charities, and startups, and we asked them to write weekly entries in response to three different prompts: 1. What is emerging for you? 2. What are you finding you need? and 3. What are you letting go of? Without exception, every leader in our study described major emotional turmoil. One leader wrote, “Just the stress of lockdown has made me wonder if this is all worth it. I’m struggling to keep my emotions in check, and the people closest to me are getting the brunt of it.” Another shared that on some days, they felt like they had lost their will to live and sense of purpose. Yet another described feeling “a sense of dread. I feel I have little grasp on how to navigate the future, much less to lead others.”

Despite their common emotional experiences, however, the leaders diverged significantly in how they responded to these challenges. Specifically, our analysis identified three distinct types of leaders, each of whom took a different approach to managing their negative emotions:

1. Heroes: Leaders who focused on the positive, doing their best to convince their teams that they would get through the crisis no matter what.
2. Technocrats: Leaders who ignored emotions altogether and focused on tactical solutions.
3. Sharers: Leaders who openly acknowledged their fears, stresses, and other negative emotions.

While there are pros and cons to every leadership style, we found that Sharers were particularly successful in building cohesive, high-performing teams that were resilient in the face of the myriad challenges posed by the pandemic. Why might this be? Both our own work and a vast body of existing research suggests several reasons why Sharers are likely to outperform Heroes and Technocrats.

Technocrats and Heroes Aren’t as Heroic as They Seem

First, while positivity can improve performance, research suggests that trying to ignore a negative emotion actually makes you feel worse. As one leader put it, “I’m sick of reading, self-motivating, learning, staying upbeat, etc. when all I can feel is tiredness from overwork and fear.” Another expressed a similar sentiment: “My positivity, resilience, and outwardly strong mindset … are pillars for those around me — I find that people are gravitating around this, but I have to protect my space and keep looking after myself when I’m tired etc., because I can give others the impression it’s all under control and ‘in good hands’ and that isn’t always true.”

In addition, a Hero leadership style can make team members feel more distant from their leader, since if the leader appears not to be struggling at all, it can put pressure on others to suppress their own challenges. A façade of positivity can decrease the well-being of both team members and leaders, undermine leaders’ relationships with employees, and ultimately reduce self-confidence and performance at work.

Similarly, while there’s certainly a time and a place for focusing on results, many of the Technocrats in our study found that ignoring emotions simply didn’t work. For one, it undermined leaders’ own mental health. As one leader noted, “At the start of the pandemic, I managed the stress and the uncertainty by looking after my own mental space a lot. Now, I am still locked in but I am a lot less kind to myself. My old ‘business as usual’ pushing has come back … I am feeling more and more out of sync and not giving myself any more of the ‘self-nurturing’ space I had at the beginning of the pandemic.”

This approach can also take a toll on leaders’ relationships with their teams. One Technocrat wrote that they were “letting go of some of the niceties and ‘fluff.’ I just don’t have enough time right now and it’s the softer sides that are being sacrificed.” And of course, letting negative emotions go unaddressed inevitably ends up impacting productivity. Another participant noted that despite (or perhaps because of) his results-focused leadership style, “there are people (and I include some senior people) who seem to be doing the very minimum that is required of them … People are hitting walls, and there are lots of frustrations.”

While emotions may seem frivolous to some, they in fact drive everything leaders care about, from job performance to turnover to customer satisfaction. By ignoring emotions, Technocrats fail both to harness the positive emotions that spur performance and to address the negative emotions that undermine it.

The Best Leaders Are Sharers

In contrast, sharing negative emotions can lessen their impact on the leader, build empathy between leaders and employees, encourage others to open up about their own negative emotions, and help others recontextualize and overcome those struggles — ultimately boosting morale and performance throughout the organization. For example, one leader found that when they opened up about emotions with their team, it allowed them “to get beyond small talk and connect more deeply… it opened up a different and richer conversation, a very ‘data rich’ discussion in a way that can be lacking from video calls.” These “more human conversations” helped teams to weather the days that still felt “very much like a roller coaster — exciting, energetic, and optimistic in one moment and deflated, down, and lethargic the next.”

Another leader wrote about how acknowledging their own emotional turbulence helped them to understand the mental state of their employees and to interact with them more effectively and empathetically. Throughout our study, we found that being open about their own inner turmoil helped Sharers’ teams to feel more comfortable doing the same, which in turn both helped everyone to cope more effectively with their negative emotions and created greater psychological closeness between teammates despite their physical separation.

Becoming a Sharer Is Difficult — But Not Impossible

Of course, becoming a Sharer is often easier said than done. In the journal entries, we found that many leaders had strong biases towards the Hero and Technocrat styles, driven by a widespread assumption that true leaders must always be aspirational and results-oriented, and that admitting negative emotions is a sign of weakness. One Hero-type leader described feeling like they “had to lead others with positivity while fighting fires on a daily basis,” and others even apologized for the negativity of their entries — as if they were ashamed not to focus on the positive, even in a private journaling exercise. Similarly, Technocrat leaders often prioritized “immediate challenges around how to work going forward,” writing that they needed “organization and focus so I don’t get distracted.”

The boundary between work and home has never been a clear line. Even when I’m in the office, for example, I’m on call if any of my four kids needs me. I remember how hard it was to get things done in my early days at Microsoft when they were babies — I had a lot of free time while they napped or played, but I couldn’t use that time productively because I might have to drop everything to attend to them at any moment.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, and as a mother and researcher, trying to manage the boundary between work and home brought a lot of invention into my life. For example, while most productivity research tends to focus on eliminating distractions, I began to imagine what we could do if we used the micro-moments we have each day productively. This led me to develop approaches to algorithmically break tasks down into microtasks that fit more easily into the fragmented way we actually work. The resulting concept, which we call microproductivity, expanded the way we think about productivity at Microsoft.

Fast forward to March 4, 2020, when the boundary between work and home truly came down and Microsoft sent its Seattle-area employees home to work. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were at the start of one of the greatest disruptions to work in generations, and it created an opportunity for us to expand our understanding of productivity yet again. Hundreds of researchers from Microsoft, LinkedIn, and GitHub came together to form the largest research initiative in Microsoft’s history, now called the “New Future of Work.” Together, while figuring out how to work from home and struggling with childcare ourselves, we’ve conducted more than 50 research projects on remote work.

Despite a year and a half of research, it’s almost impossible to predict what work will look like months from now, let alone years. We see, for example, that while people miss many things about working from the office, the idea of losing the flexibility of remote work is scary; CEO Satya Nadella calls this the “hybrid paradox.” But the research points to a clear need for managers to create a new definition of productivity that considers the hybrid paradox — one that not only factors in how much people get done, but how they actually work when the boundary between work and home no longer exists.

A New Definition of Productivity

Information worker productivity is hard to define and measure, but researchers use two key types of data to approximate it: 1) self-reported worker data, or asking people if they feel productive, and 2) worker activity data, or counting the number of emails sent or lines of code written. When companies first went remote, many were surprised to see that these standard metrics of productivity remained high. For instance, one year into the pandemic, Microsoft’s Work Trend Index survey showed that self-assessed productivity of more than 30,000 global workers external to Microsoft remained the same or higher. Microsoft’s annual employee survey showed similar results.

Looking at activity data, a study in one division of Microsoft showed that the number of features checked in by developers per hour increased by 1.5% while focus time increased by 6%. Repositories in GitHub also saw flat or increasing activity.

But when we look at the research more closely, it’s clear these metrics don’t tell the whole story. As work pushed into our homes, helpful boundaries began to blur. Almost half (49%) of Microsoft employees in one study reported working longer hours, and only 9% reported working fewer. In a global study of workers external to Microsoft one year into the pandemic, 54% said they felt overworked and 39% reported feeling exhausted.

We also lost a lot of the benefits of working together in the office. Participants in our studies reported that creative work like group brainstorming was more difficult while remote. There’s also mounting evidence of lost connection to coworkers. A recent paper we published in Nature Human Behavior found that our networks at work are becoming more siloed, presenting risks to innovation, knowledge transfer, and ultimately, productivity.

Study after study has shown that it’s not enough to be guided by simple measures of productivity as we figure out how to move to hybrid work. While it may be tempting to equate high levels of employee activity with success, doing so misses the factors that drive long-term, sustainable innovation. We must expand the way we think about productivity to focus on well-being, social connections, and collaboration and the innovation they bring to drive business success.

Working with This New Definition

Based on what we’re seeing in the research, here are some ways managers can embrace a more expansive view of productivity in a hybrid world — one that promotes well-being, collaboration, and innovation for you and your team.

Well-being

Despite the burnout so many of us feel, the hybrid environment offers an opportunity to create a more sustainable approach to work. Remote and in-person work both have distinct advantages and disadvantages, and rather than expecting the same outcomes from each, we can build on what makes them unique.

When in the office, prioritize relationships and collaborative work like brainstorming around a whiteboard. When working from home, encourage people to design their days to include other priorities such as family, fitness, or hobbies. They should take a nap if they need one and step outside between meetings. Brain studies show that even five-minute breaks between remote meetings help people think more clearly and reduce stress.

Likewise, watch out for the risks each type of work carries with it. People can avoid the long commutes they used to have by staggering their schedules to avoid traffic. Encourage them to set boundaries at home so they don’t work every hour of the day just because they can.

The trick is finding what works for each individual. A key theme in our research is that there are enormous individual differences in whether and how remote work can be effective. People have different experiences depending on their tenure at a company, where they live, and their gender, race, or role. Even individuals with similar contexts have idiosyncratically different experiences. For instance, some Microsoft employees cite work-life balance and focus time as reasons to go into the office, while others cite those exact things as reasons to work from home.

Over the next few months, ask people to take the time to reflect on when and where they feel the most or least productive. Have them ask themselves: Do I seem to work better in the morning or evening? When I work from a certain location, are there fewer interruptions? Do I feel more focused?

Collaboration

At Microsoft, the biggest reasons employees want to go back to the office are collaboration and social connections. But if someone goes into the office on a day the rest of their team works from home, they won’t get those in-person interactions. A key aspect of making hybrid work productive is finding a compromise between individual workstyles and team needs.

One way to do this is by making team agreements. At Microsoft, we’re asking each team to create a set of team norms that define how they’d like to work together in our hybrid workplace. Individuals can share how they work best. Teams can establish meeting-free days or plan regular in-person team meetings. To avoid one person’s flexible working hours becoming another person’s after-hours messaging, managers can set norms around the times of day responses are expected.

It’s also important to ensure hybrid meetings are as inclusive and intentional as possible. Use a hand-raise feature to make sure everyone gets a chance to speak and, if you’re using meeting chat, assign a moderator who’s separate from the person running the meeting to follow the chat and bring key subjects into the conversation. These things are particularly important if the remote people are more junior than those in the room. Other things we’re experimenting with include asking in-person attendees to join meetings as soon as they arrive to the meeting room so remote participants are included in the pre-meeting chat. In-person attendees may also want to join on their individual laptops so remote participants have a better view of them.

Under the old definition of productivity, coordinating team collaboration around individual workstyles and thinking hard about whether your team should change its meeting practices might have seemed unnecessary, high maintenance, or even awkward. With the new definition of productivity in mind, these activities are essential.

Innovation

In the simplest sense, innovation often requires people getting together to exchange and prototype ideas and brainstorm solutions, balanced with time for individual focus and reflection. If done right, hybrid work can create exactly those conditions. If done wrong, those important social connections can erode and impact innovation. Thinking of productivity more expansively — by optimizing for the conditions that spur innovation — can help hedge against those risks.

Do you know who started McDonalds? Nike? What about Chevrolet? While some may know a name, they wouldn’t be able to match a face to that name. Today, many of the largest brands in the world can be matched with a face.

Elon Musk is synonymous with Tesla. It’s becoming increasingly popular for large brands to have a face associated with them, whether it’s a high-ranking C-level executive or the founder. There are several reasons why this is advantageous and something you should consider.

Consumers connect more strongly with a personality than with a faceless brand 

A lot has changed over the years, especially how brands interact with consumers. Thirty years ago, there were very limited ways to advertise — TV, radio and print were the main delivery vehicles for advertisements.

Messaging was very direct. “This is our product, and this is what it does.” Brands had to be consistent with their messaging, driving brand familiarity through the use of a logo and tagline, hoping it translated to sales the next time the consumer was shopping in a retail environment.

Today, a logo isn’t even an afterthought. Many successful brands use a simple text-based logo with nothing more than font matching their vibe. The branding and advertising can be very direct and go for the conversion immediately because of online shopping.

With the goal of making that connection quickly, many brands began using a familiar face to establish a strong brand-consumer relationship. Consumers connect with and trust a brand with a face more than they do a faceless brand. Then, when that face has a distinctive and unforgettable personality, the results can be amplified tenfold.

You can tell your story better than anyone else

Would Tesla have a similar success story if it used a random celebrity spokesperson rather than Elon Musk? No, because nobody can tell the brand’s story better than Elon. While he didn’t originally start the company, he invested, took control and quickly made sure to brand the company with his image and likeness.

He eats, breathes and sleeps Tesla. He is the leading authority on all things Tesla-related because he is in the trenches daily. Who else could relay breaking news, exciting developments and explain the direction of the company the same way? Nobody, and the same applies to you and your business.

Every business has a story, and the brands that figure out how to tell it authentically benefit greatly. Consumers love to hear the “why” behind brands. There are so many companies out there with amazing stories that never get heard because they never get told.

Put your story out there and be the delivery mechanism for sharing your story. It’s much more effective when it’s told by you.

Believing in your own product or service is the strongest statement you can make

Become the modern-day entrepreneur, an entrepreneur influencer. It is the strongest statement an entrepreneur can make — to be the face of the business you founded means putting yourself out there,  not just calling the shots behind a desk. It means that you’re all-in on your brand and will be there for the ups and downs alike, committed to bringing the best product or service to market. No amount of fancy advertisements or paid celebrity endorsements can match that level of trust or commitment.

It’s easy to hide behind a name and company, or even staff members and executives, but those that step out in front of everyone ready to face the music head-on are making a bold statement. Consumers know that brands will face challenges and not everything will be smooth sailing, which is another reason they respect the move and will patronize brands with a face over one with no personal connection. 

We have all heard the truism that it takes a village to raise a child, and of course we all know that if you want to get ahead at work and in your career, you need to be an effective teammate and successful networker. But most fathers have not yet put two and two together and realized the importance of building a network of parenting allies at work.

Our research on modern working dads shows that while fathers still want (and need) successful careers, they also want to be present and involved as parents and partners. They want to share the workload and the joys. They want to soothe a crying baby at night and be home in time for baths and story time. They want fulfilling weekends with their family and meaningful time with their children throughout the week.

Unfortunately, workplace policy and tradition are still holding them back. The notion of fatherhood being segregated from work life, as well as a culture of presenteeism and face time, have been the norm since the advent of the office. Rather than confronting this culture, many dads succumb to it, particularly if their finances are fragile.

Nurturing a network of parenting allies can help fathers on two levels: support and advocacy. On the support level, your parenting allies are the colleagues who will have your back when you have to rush home to look after a sick child or offer a sympathetic ear when you’re overwhelmed. This type of support is interpersonal, unofficial, and can be fostered in any corporate culture. If a colleague can support you emotionally or practically in your goal of succeeding in your career and as a parent—and you do the same for them—then they’re a worthy ally.

The advocacy level of your parenting ally network has a higher goal: changing company culture for the better. If you’re hoping to mold your organization into a friendlier place for working parents, going it alone is a recipe for failure. Parenting allies can help you widen the discussion and take it in different directions. They have conversations with a wider range of people. They normalize the ideas and leadership starts to take notice. Slowly, they change minds.

Think about advocating for a more progressive paternity leave policy. One dad can’t fight for change by himself—he needs allies to help spread the word. A preponderance of conversations are needed about how better leave means happier, more productive dads. Fathers, and those who intend to become fathers, stay with the company longer, and new talent is easier to recruit. What a business loses in long hours, it gains in loyalty. Mothers benefit when fathers take longer paternity leave. These messages need to spread across the shop floor, in HR, marketing, and finance, and in the CEO’s office.

Building your parenting ally network

More people than you might think can be your parenting allies. Many will be mothers—moms have been fighting for parental work rights for decades, and they’ll appreciate the vigor a new generation of involved dads can bring. Your allies are likely to include parents who are older than you, those who remember the challenges they faced combining their family and career. An ally can have any job title, though if they have a direct influence on parental policy at work they can be more effective. They come in all shapes and sizes. They can be sounding boards for your own thoughts or ideas, or they can be in a position to spread those ideas widely. Here are a few steps to start the conversation.

Share your life as a dad, in all its messy, wonderful glory. We often hear of dads who are successful and popular at work and who keep the fatherhood side of their identities entirely hidden from colleagues and clients. This reticence has the tendency to be contagious. To overcome it, simply start talking. Talk about your weekend and include the family outing. Mention the fact that you’re leaving on time today to get home for story time. Joke about that diaper change that went horribly wrong.

Normalize your parenting life and your colleagues will see you don’t treat it as a taboo subject either. Maybe a parent with younger children will want to ask you for advice or a parent of older kids will have some for you. Either way, you’ve created a space for discussion. If you’re a manager, you’ve also provided an example for other dads to talk about their lives as parents. Don’t forget to mention the pressure of your dual responsibilities. Free others to admit that being a good worker and a good dad is sometimes a tough balancing act.

Fly your dad flag virtually. If you work remotely, you won’t bump into other parents in the kitchen, but the principle remains the same, even if you’re chatting over Zoom or Teams. Hang your children’s artwork in your background. Make your profile photo a family photo. Take an occasional meeting with a toddler on your lap. Start a Slack group for parents and parenting issues, invite a few people, and watch word of mouth take over. Create a virtual discussion around parenting.

Join existing conversations. There may already be formal parents’ groups in your organization. These are a brilliant way for moms and dads to start talking about the issues at work that affect them as parents. We’ve led a number of parent networking sessions where we’ve been asked to talk about the challenges we’ve faced as working dads. Workplace parenting groups are more likely to be mom-focused, often because moms are more likely to set them up. You and your allies can help change that dynamic.

Create a dads’ network. If there are no ready-made parent networks at your workplace, start your own. Make it a dads’ network, at least to start with, to coax reluctant fathers out into the open. Some men might be put off by the idea of a general parenting club and more comfortable discussing issues with other dads. You can change the policy, if that feels right, later. We’ve seen more and more work-based dad clubs starting to emerge, not least through our own Dad Connect program, which aims to help dads forge connections within and across organizations.

Ask other dads at your workplace if they’d like to meet informally to talk about issues around parenthood and work that are important to them. It shouldn’t require too much time or energy, so once a month at lunchtime might be enough to begin. Ask HR if you can advertise the group in the staff newsletter or put a poster on the notice board. Keep an email list or Slack group of interested individuals and contact them before each meeting.

As the group becomes more established, widen its responsibilities. Invite a member of the senior management team to talk about what the business is doing to promote family-friendly working practices. Invite moms to meetings or create ties with mom groups in the business. Compile a document of innovations the group would like to see implemented, alongside examples of best practices. Keep the group engaged between meetings through regular messaging and encourage members to discuss practical, everyday questions, like recommendations for family-friendly restaurants or the best things to do with a four-year-old this weekend.

To be sure, the return-to-office scramble is untenable for many workers because of health or other family-related reasons. But for others, the return is untenable because a newfound commitment to living on purpose won’t let them go back to be handcuffed to the habits of yesteryear.Add Insight
to your inbox.

The pain of this pandemic, with its death toll of nearly 4 million lives lost worldwide, has triggered many of us to go deeper to explore existential questions—from “why am I here?” to “what is true success, and what does that look like for me?” And as much as we all want to put COVID-19 behind us, the answers we seek may actually be found in our pandemic-era reflections. Where there is profound pain and loss, we can also find purpose. 

This year’s International Day of Purpose (observed annually on June 20) offers us a moment to take stock of three indispensable lessons that the pandemic has taught us for the journey ahead.

Let Your Pain Point You to Purpose 

To say that the pandemic has been painful is an understatement. And it’s only natural to want to organize our lives in such a way as to reduce, eliminate, and quickly move beyond pain in our lives. However, as I’ve seen in my work as a professor, executive coach, and pastor, the most painful experiences can often signal where our purpose lies. The pain we experience can not only produce empathy but also give us clarity regarding where we can make our best and highest contributions to alleviate human suffering.

For example, during the early months of the pandemic, the owner of a small, “nonessential” business had to close her doors. Without any income and with bills mounting, she had to turn to a local food pantry for assistance. Out of that painful experience, however, came an overwhelming sense of gratitude and a renewed desire to help others once she landed on her feet. When her business reopened, she shared her story with her customers and asked them to contribute nonperishable food items. Their response was so overwhelming that her small business actually became the biggest collection point for her local food pantry! A small act of kindness birthed out of deep personal pain allowed this small-town entrepreneur to put her purpose into action; it just might do the same for us.

Embrace the Disruption

For many of us, the pandemic upended almost every aspect of our lives. Many jobs (and cancelled family reunions) were catapulted into the unfamiliar environment of Zoom, Teams, or Webex, and many gym memberships were cancelled in favor of at-home fitness regimens. Yet out of that disruption came new routines and changed perspectives. As we look forward to a post-pandemic reality, we cannot be in such a hurry to get back to “normal” that we forget what we learned. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to examine our new ways of thinking, being, and doing. It will never be 2019 again and, in many ways, that’s probably for the best.

There may be some things that we do not or should not want to resume. For example, a workplace that is returning to mandatory, 100 percent in-person work, with zero flexibility or hybrid arrangements, might be best left behind. Flexibility during the day—to care for family or even ourselves—has become too important for many to abandon. The pandemic highlighted the folly of pursuing the myth of work–life balance and shined a bright spotlight on the value of whole-life integration—an approach that invites us to do our best each day to fully live into all of the complex dimensions of our lives with greater dexterity. During this pandemic, we have seen many workers play the roles of employee, caregiver, spouse/partner, and homeowner—all within the same hour! 

To live the purposeful lives we desire in whatever our “new normal” will be, we can’t afford to relinquish some of those pandemic-induced innovations that actually helped us flourish in all of our roles in these challenging times. 

Let Your Values Take the Lead

For many of us, the pandemic helped us to clarify what is and what is not important in our lives. Many of the things we spent so much time pursuing and concerning ourselves with before the pandemic—the garages full of cars, the walk-in closets full of clothes, or the number of garages and closets one has—just don’t register with the preoccupying importance that they once did in the face of a life-or-death global pandemic. Just the other day, I was talking with an executive who, as he was preparing for his first in-person board meeting in over a year, laughingly confessed, “I’m not sure whether my suits even fit or if I remember how to tie a tie.” The truth is, so much of what used to matter just plain doesn’t matter anymore.

It’s been 10 years since I co-authored the HBR article “Making Yourself Indispensable,” with John H. Zenger and Joseph Folkman. In the article we provided a model to get useful and actionable feedback on one’s leadership effectiveness, and how to uniquely develop your strengths in those areas.

As I re-read the article recently, I was struck by a statement we made about using an informal 360 to get feedback from colleagues and direct reports: Do your best to exhibit receptiveness and to create a feeling of safety (especially for direct reports). Make it clear that you’re seeking self-improvement. Tell your colleagues explicitly that you are open to negative feedback and that you will absorb it professionally and appropriately — and without retribution. Of course, you need to follow through on this promise, or the entire process will fail.

Unlike formal 360s which usually involve anonymous surveys, informal 360s are based on direct conversations with team members. The informal 360 is incredibly valuable for leaders as a means to seek feedback as well as develop stronger alliances with colleagues. However, as I’ve worked with leaders and teams using informal 360s over the past 10 years, I’ve realized we may have understated the challenges associated with getting actionable feedback from colleagues in this face-to-face assessment format. There are two important points I would like to add to “Making Yourself Indispensable” to help leaders get more out of an informal 360:

1. The good stuff is easy. The “fatal flaws” are much, much harder to uncover.

I didn’t think we went far enough in stating: “Tell your colleagues that you are open to negative feedback,” implying that would be sufficient to get a direct report to candidly share their thoughts about your weaknesses. Most people are incredibly loath to say anything negative, and it will take some serious effort on your part to enable the people you work with to tell you the truth about yourself — the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I saw this in action recently when I was hired as part of an executive coaching engagement to work with an EVP in a Fortune 500 company. I was talking with the CEO, who had hired me, about the performance of this leader. The CEO shared some very direct examples and feedback about this person that had not been aired quite so candidly in our previous chats. I asked the CEO if he had ever talked with the EVP about this issue, using the precise language he just shared with me. He said no. I asked if I could share his thoughts with the EVP, and he backpedaled, asking if he could think about it first. I share this example to highlight that even for the top executive in the company, it can be tough to share candid feedback if the stage is not properly set.

One benefit of an informal 360 is that whatever is shared is just between you and the person giving feedback is off the official record, not evaluated by HR or executives. This can open a valuable safe space for evaluators to get real with you about your impact as a leader.

To make this work, you must first promise total amnesty to participants, and I don’t use that term lightly. Simply “creating safety” and “exhibiting receptiveness” (as we wrote in our previous article) are not sufficient for most people to be willing to share the kind of feedback you need to hear. It can be extremely challenging to get people to share their true thoughts about your leadership weaknesses when hearing their honest opinions about any flaws might upset you. This is doubly hard if you have a history of getting angry or shooting the messenger.

You will need to go out of your way to invite opinions that others think you may not want to hear. Tell participants: “I want to hear your real perspectives about the impact I have on you as a leader, even where it’s negative. I promise you amnesty — and that I will not respond defensively or with retribution, even if I don’t like what I hear. I value your perspective.” And then of course, you need to make good on your promise.

You’ll find that it’s easy to get a colleague to share the good stuff you’re doing. People naturally want you to feel good and associate themselves with giving you a lift. But when an executive asks, “Tell me about my fatal flaws,” the response I’ve heard recounted dozens of times is, “Well, it’s not a fatal flaw, but . . . [insert critical leadership problem here].” This is a valuable clue, and you should seriously consider addressing the issue. Being attuned and open to this candid feedback is extremely valuable in your efforts to become an exceptional leader.

2. The informal 360 process builds mutual trust in a way a formal survey cannot.

While formal surveys can provide a vehicle for sharing comments anonymously, a common criticism is that comments lack depth or aren’t fully clear. The informal 360 stimulates a shift in the way people interact and discuss these comments. And since leadership is, at its core, a relational and interactive skill, the informal 360 facilitates a change in the way leaders discuss performance with their teams.

One beneficial effect of engaging in these open dialogues about areas where you can improve is that, over time, it builds the kind of trust that allows you to be frank with others. This is not to say that when you receive feedback, you immediately turn around and deliver your own feedback to the other person. That old phrase about feedback being a gift doesn’t suggest “regifting” right away. But graciously receiving feedback in the informal 360 can open a more productive dialogue about performance and the impact we have on others.

I’ve observed many instances when a leader was able to create an atmosphere of openness and trust, which changed the way colleagues interacted and discussed performance issues. The informal 360 process establishes accepting the perspectives of others as the norm, even when people may not completely agree. One leader told me that as a result of this process, he and the president of a division had a more valuable relationship because now they could openly address the challenging issues and dissenting opinions that were previously simmering beneath the surface.

It’s powerful when leaders acknowledge their weaknesses, demonstrate their commitment to development, and make changes. The environment of trust you establish by accepting feedback graciously creates a collaborative two-way street. Directness and candor, when provided in the spirit of genuinely helping and supporting the growth of colleagues, can create a dynamic mindset that inspires meaningful change within teams. We all grow together when we can speak truthfully about areas that need improvement.

The informal 360 is a valuable tool for increasing leadership competency and a key to making yourself indispensable.

The global pandemic has created new challenges and opportunities in almost every industry, and as the economy reopens competition will be intense. Winners will be those who most clearly understand their customer’s needs, collaborate to identify multiple solutions, prototype, iterate and bring new ideas to market. Those behaviors will only happen when people come together in the new, modern workplace.

By all indications the future of work is hybrid: 52% of U.S. workers would prefer a mix of working from home and the office, saying it has a positive impact on their ability to be creative, solve problems and build relationships. Global research tells us 72% of corporate leaders plan to offer a hybrid model, and only 13% say they expect to decrease their real estate footprint in the next year, suggesting that organizations will continue to leverage their workplaces within a hybrid work future.

But getting hybrid right will be hard. Deciding who works from the office and how often is a complex issue, and it will be different for every organization. If not done well it could threaten culture, collaboration, and innovation. Conversely, a well-executed hybrid workplace can be a magnet that brings people together and helps us work better than ever before.

Organizations who will win know that workplaces designed for people and the resiliency of their organizations will help them move forward, learn, and remain competitive. To start, more than 50% of U.S. companies plan to pilot new spaces as part of their return to the office this year, for example, repurposing a café into a high-energy social and collaboration space that better supports new hybrid work patterns.

As architects and office-furniture designers serving the world’s largest organizations, we recommend leaders think through four design approaches as you consider your hybrid strategy.

Braid the Digital and Physical Experience

As leaders of global teams, we know that bridging the gap between in-person and remote participants is hard, and hybrid work means there will inevitably be someone who is remote, regardless of well teams coordinate their in-office days. Remote colleagues can feel frustrated and unable to participate equally, becoming less engaged. This is especially true for creative and innovative work, such as brainstorming, which often use analog whiteboards or other physical products that are difficult for people on the other side of the camera to fully experience.

The solution is to integrate physical spaces and technology with three key concepts in mind: equity, engagement, and ease.

For example, currently, many conference rooms consist of a long table with a monitor at the end. In-person attendees sit around the table while remote participants are featured in a grid of tiny boxes, often on the same screen as any shared content.

One way to create more equity is to give each participant their own screen, placing monitors on rolling carts that can easily be moved around. Teams can pull a remote colleague into a breakout session or up to the table. Many software systems now let you split people and content onto separate displays.

To be fully engaged, people need clear sightlines to one another and to the content. Designing for employee engagement in digital-to-physical space means thinking like a movie director – lights, camera, audio, content. Some solutions we’re seeing are angled or mobile tables, additional lighting, extra speakers, in room microphones, and easy-to-move markerboards and displays.

In addition, research tells us more people will connect to a meeting on their individual devices as well as the technology in the room. Ample power supplies, whiteboards, and a variety of software solutions will contribute to an easier, more seamless hybrid collaboration experience for people.

Flip Enclosed and Open Spaces

It is time to rethink the open plan. For decades, individual workstations have become more open with ever-increasing density, while meetings are held in enclosed conference rooms. As people return to the office, these spaces will begin to shift. Meetings will happen more often in open spaces with movable boundaries, and individual focus work will happen in enclosed spaces like pods or small enclaves.

Open collaboration spaces are inherently more flexible because they don’t require fixed features in their design, so they can morph and change as new work patterns emerge. Innovation, problem-solving, and co-creation often use agile approaches — for example, quick stand-up meetings which require visible, persistent content which can be hosted in open spaces, defined by flexible furniture, easy-to-access tech, and other design elements.

Meanwhile, individual spaces will need more enclosure to provide different levels of visual and acoustical privacy that people have come to expect while working at home. Video calls will happen everywhere, so enclosures — screens, panels, pods — will give people places to focus and mitigate disruptions.

Shift from Fixed to Fluid

Buildings are built for permanence, meanwhile the pace of business and change continues to accelerate. We can see the tensions between slow and fast emerge in the rise of pop-ups and coworking models with demand for shorter lease terms. Most companies who have real estate are asking, how much space do we need?

The hybrid future solves for a more fluid workplace that can flex as needs change. Not only does this accelerate innovation and advance the culture of the organization, it can ensure real estate is always optimized. At Steelcase, we’ve optimized our own space by designing an open area that supports hybrid meetings in the morning, becomes the café at lunch, hosts a town hall in the afternoon, and can be rented for an evening event.

Balance “We” and “Me” Work

The impact of the pandemic on careers and jobs has been massive. According to the International Labour Organization, as many as 114 million jobs were lost in 2020. In addition, the reduction of working hours was found to be equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs. The impact on the labor force has been disproportionate, and in the United States alone, the women’s labor-force participation rate has dropped to just 57%, the lowest since 1988. Thousands, if not millions, are now trying to re-enter the job market after a career gap.

For someone who is attempting to re-enter the workforce now after a career gap  — possibly one that wasn’t by choice — the prospect of explaining the employment gap to a panel of interviewers could be an embarrassing and daunting one. It is also not surprising to find friends and family dishing out advice like, “Whatever you do, secure a job offer before you leave this one, or else you’ll have a hard time explaining a career gap.” Advice as such further reinforces the mindset that having a career gap is like having a demerit point on your record, so the discomfort is understandable.

I have worked with clients who had career gaps of varying length, and I often notice that with the steps illustrated below, it takes them little effort to change their uneasiness into a calm, quiet confidence.

Here are four ways to help you bounce back from a career gap with grace and class.

1. Clarify what you really think about your career gap

From my experience, what you think of the career gap often matters more than what the hiring manager thinks. When my clients themselves are uneasy about the discussion, they project that discomfort to the audience, and it might be described as awkward, tentative or even guilty. Most interviewers can pick up on that energy; as a person who has been on many interview panels, I can attest to that. When we dove deeper into what was behind the emotions in my clients, we realized that the source was a lack of acceptance of their employment gap.

Some clients did experience emotions like resentment (when a choice was not given to them), anger or self-doubt — all of which need to be processed, made peace with and then set aside. For the majority of my clients, once they come to terms with their career gap, they are able to speak about the employment gap easily and with confidence.

2. Practice your response

You can expect interviewers to be curious. They might ask an open-ended question, and you need to practice your response until it “rolls off your tongue.” You might be tempted to divulge too many details, but before you do that, consider what is valuable to the interviewers (and to you). You definitely want to maintain a certain level of honesty, but keep it to the point so you can move on to discuss other subjects — like why you make a great candidate for the role.

3. Focus on the learning you have gained during the gap

Life does happen to people from time to time, and jobseekers can help themselves by accepting responsibility for it — and handling it with maturity during the interview.

The interview panel might not be very keen to hear how life was mundane and dreary, so steer the conversation towards the learning that you’ve gained over the course of the months or years of your gap. 

If you’re feeling social anxiety about returning to the office, you’re not alone. Many folks are feeling unsettled. After over a year of remote work — and seeing our coworkers only on screen — the idea of seeing everyone again in person can feel overwhelming. And, since the Covid landscape is still in flux, it’s hard to feel sure about how long the “return to normal” will last.

You might be wondering why getting back to the office is rattling you so much. After all, you coped with office-life before. Here’s why the transition back to our glass towers might feel surprisingly difficult, and how to ease your reentry.

1. Transitions naturally spike our anxiety.

A lot of human psychology has an evolutionary basis. Familiar situations tend to be safer and more predictable for us. They allow us to let our guard down. In unfamiliar situations, we’re wired to be more on edge, and constantly on the lookout for dangers. Because of this, transitions tend to increase our anxiety. We’re always subtly on the lookout for potential threats. This reaction has an adaptive basis, but it can feel quite exhausting.

Think of how you’ve felt in your first six months in a new job. That’s a stressful period for many people as they learn new skills and procedures, and the cultural norms of their new workplace. Although you may be returning to your old job, a lot has changed, and it might be helpful to expect to feel the same type of adjustment stress. Give yourself the same grace and self-compassion you would if you were starting a new job or embarking on transition, like starting college or grad school. See this article if you need specific tips for how to be kinder to yourself.

2. Whenever you’ve avoided something, you’ll feel anxious about returning to it.

Imagine an elite gymnast who has been out for several months with an injury. They weren’t purposely avoiding training or procrastinating. They were benched because of their injury. Yet, when they return, they’re likely to feel a lot of anticipatory anxiety about performing moves they routinely performed before.

That’s how anxiety works, across the board. We feel anxious about anything we’ve “avoided” even if the break was externally imposed. If you’re a parent, you might find yourself feeling anxious about being separated from your child during the day, even if this was routine in your family before. Or, you may feel anxious about making small talk or managing other people’s personalities at work.

What’s the solution? Like the gymnast, when you gradually get back into your previous activities, your built-up anxiety will naturally subside.

3. Social relationships and boundaries have changed.

Pre-pandemic, it’s highly unlikely you knew much about your coworkers’ health decisions. Now, you’d probably quite like to know who in your office is vaccinated and who isn’t. Pre-pandemic, your colleagues may never have seen your home or your children, but now they have, thanks to all the Zoom meetings.

As people return to the office, some coworkers will likely become influencers. They’ll lead office culture and norms in terms of how many Covid precautions are kept up, and how vigilantly. Other people may be ostracized. For example, if they’re someone who chooses not to vaccinate and to keep masking, when everyone else wants to take their masks off for good. This shakedown may make the preexisting pecking order and popularity contest of the office even more obvious. For example, if “cool” coworkers are eschewing their masks, going out to lunch, and acting completely as before, but “picky” coworkers are still masking and eating lunch at their desks.

Likewise, some coworkers may be thrilled to get back to the office and find it helps their productivity, whereas other people may be feeling the reverse. People’s circumstances and natures are different, so your perspective won’t be identical to someone else’s. If a leader or coworker is shouting from the rooftop about how we need to get back to the office to regain productivity and camaraderie, they’re probably overgeneralizing from their own perspective and experience.

The solution to all of this is tolerance, acceptance, and refraining from gossip.

4. Be intentional about retaining the best parts of WFH and office-life.

Working from home was a big natural experiment. You might’ve learned a bunch about what helps and hurts your productivity, and helps you feel happy. Some of these insights will be practical, like you learned you really need the two huge monitors you had at the office. Or, you might’ve found yourself eating a better lunch at home, or taking more walks, and that those behaviors helped you mentally.

Some of your insights into yourself may also have been social. What did you learn about the social rhythms that best support your productivity? Did you develop new strategies for getting deep work done? Did you manage interruptions differently? Did you develop more efficient ways of communicating? What did you miss about seeing your coworkers in-person? What did you miss about not going to conventions or doing business travel?

Our behavior and habits are very influenced by our environment. If there are pandemic habits and pluses you want to keep when you change environments and go back to the office, you’ll need to be very intentional about how you establish those. You’ll need to purposefully form those habits in your new (but old) office environment. Without this, you’ll quickly go back to doing everything the way you did before.

Good habits that felt solid and well-established when you were working from home (like lunchtime walks or healthy lunches) will become very fragile when your environment and routines shift back to the office. You’ll need to establish these habits almost from square one, as if they were completely new habits. This is because habits need consistent cues, and the cues you had at home will likely no longer be present, at least not in the same way.

Feeling anxious about going back to the office doesn’t mean you’re fragile or have poor coping skills. There are good reasons that these types of transitions spike our anxiety. Try the tips mentioned here to navigate the shift as smoothly as possible, and to better understand the perspectives of your colleagues and how they may be navigating the transition back, too.

That’s much lower compared with undergraduate students. More than 80% of first-time, full-time undergraduates at private, nonprofit four-year institutions received institutional grants, and about 50% of those students at public colleges received institutional grants, according to NCES data from the 2017-2018 academic year. Additionally, 33% to 38% of undergraduates at those schools received federal grants and 25% to 38% received state or local grants.

While scholarships for undergraduates are common, many students are unaware grants and scholarships exist at the graduate level. These forms of financial aid typically don’t cover a graduate student’s entire cost of attendance – a Sallie Mae study conducted in 2017, How America Pays for Graduate School, found that grants, scholarships, fellowships or tuition waivers typically pay for about 15% of grad school costs – but every dollar helps. 

Sallie Mae’s online tool, Graduate School Scholarship Search, allows current and prospective graduate and professional students to hunt for private scholarships and boasts more than 950,000 scholarships worth up to $1 billion.

“There’s a lack of understanding that there’s availability of scholarships for grad school,” says Rick Castellano, a Sallie Mae spokesman. “With grad students, they don’t know where to look. When we talk to them, they’ll just say they Google searched.”

In light of the coronavirus pandemic, Castellano says students should feel more empowered to shop around and drive the conversation this year. “Don’t be afraid to negotiate for more aid,” he wrote in an email.

“The conversation is a two-way street; call your financial aid office, explain your situation (especially if it’s changed in light of COVID-19), and be open about what financial resources it would take for you to attend. You might be surprised by how willing a school is to work with you,” he says.

For prospective graduate and professional students, here are a few approaches to consider when tracking down free money to pay for an advanced degree.

Use Scholarship Search Engines

While Sallie Mae’s Graduate School Scholarship Search lists scholarships and fellowships available at the graduate level, other scholarship search engines list private scholarships for grad students in addition to awards available for undergraduate college students. A few of these scholarship databases include Unigo, Fastweb and the U.S. News Scholarship Finder.

GoGrad is another online resource that lists niche scholarships for prospective and current grad students. 

While graduate scholarships tend to be more modest compared with those offered to undergraduates, experts say a $1,000 award can still help reduce living costs and student loan borrowing.

Consider Free Graduate Schools

Students interested in attending graduate school may want to consider tuition-free programs.

For instance, New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine made headlines in 2018 when it announced a first-of-its-kind, full-tuition scholarship to all students. The scholarship amounted to $57,476 for the 2020-2021 academic year, and it is awarded to every student regardless of merit or financial need. It does not cover other fees and expenses. 

In 2019, the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine announced it would provide around half of its new students with free tuition, which amounted to $68,480 in 2020–2021. 

Identify Scholarships Available Via Professional Organizations

Students can apply for graduate scholarships by finding and joining professional associations in their chosen field of study. For instance, undergraduate and graduate members of the National Black MBA Association Inc. can apply for an award of up to $5,000. 

As another example, the Dental Trade Alliance Foundation awards graduate scholarships of at least $5,000 to a varying number of dental students annually.

More than a year after the pandemic’s global debut, physical interaction is slowly resuming to workplaces in different parts of the world. However, hybrid work is here to stay, as remote and virtual work will continue for many. Now is a good time for executives to start planning what their hybrid organizations will look like, and how to manage them.

Our research team, which includes a past public company CEO and current chair of several boards, strategy consultants, and a professor at Harvard Business School, wanted to gain insight in how to approach this challenge. We interviewed and surveyed 38 top leaders at five global businesses in multiple Nordic countries, spanning manufacturing to consumer-facing sectors, to find out what are their biggest challenges in managing in the hybrid mode. Participants ranged from vice presidents to CEOs in rank.

Nordic leadership teams provide a particularly interesting benchmark for hybrid management since they operate in complex and challenging settings with multiple nationalities and native languages among top management. Just as test driving a car in more difficult terrain can expose weaknesses faster, interviews in this setting can surface challenges organizations face but may have been able to ignore or mask to date. As organizations model longer-term practices for the hybrid world, leaders should examine their organization for hidden issues that need to be addressed.

Our conversations surfaced surprising organizational tensions. To manage them requires new approaches and skills. We summarize our insights into four key imperatives that leaders need to observe to be effective in a hybrid world.

1. The Virtual World Does Not Treat Roles and Tasks Equally

The executives we interviewed say that hybrid settings bring with them several new types of tensions between different levels of the organization, and even among executives themselves.

The most surprising one is emerging within upper management itself. CEOs often say that they are quite satisfied with how effective their team has been in a virtual format. Yet, second- to third-level executives, such as the VPs and country leads just below the global executive team, are more skeptical.

To some extent, this isn’t surprising; one rarely makes it to the top of a global executive team without showing significant self-direction, soft skills, adeptness with ambiguity, presentation and speaking skills — traits that make team dynamics on Zoom thrive.

These skills, however, are often weaker at lower levels. Some executives and middle managers we interviewed said they were frustrated with their own virtual effectiveness and with the difficulties to express themselves fluently. This is worrisome, as middle managers are also usually the ones who have had to face and manage the new operational complexities first-hand. As the CEO of a European logistics company noted, “We carried out an engagement survey after the summer, and it became obvious that some managers were struggling in the new environment. Some managers were reactive rather than proactive, and in a way had disappeared. The subordinates were lacking in support or had increasingly tense interaction with the managers.”

So, CEOs need to be cautious about inferring that their own virtual experiences are representative of the whole company and learn what they can do to help support others. For the above CEO’s company, that meant “increased managerial training and mentoring” and making “some changes in top and middle management.”

Another tension we uncovered is who gets access to the best technology. The quality of video equipment, screen size, and web connections matter greatly for virtual impressions. During the pandemic, many companies deployed top-notch digital equipment to settings and roles where it delivers obvious returns, like teams dealing with customers or those that engage in complex strategic and innovative work where collaboration is key.

While this equipment can deliver a great ROI, they are not equally available to everyone — not even to executives at the same organizational level. In fact, our team concluded from comparing interviews within the same company that today’s broadband internet and top-notch cameras are “designer business suits.” Leaders need to be cautious that they do not make poor talent judgments and decisions based upon these conditions — just as the best-dressed employee did not always turn out to be the smartest.

Finally, executives that we interviewed predicted business travel will decline on average 40% in the post-Covid world. This can result in big and lasting differences in face time with the boss, even among personnel at the same organizational level. We may have settings where one has purely in-person relationships with some people and purely remote relationships with some others. Leaders need to be careful, again, about taking into account these dynamics for their employee evaluations.

2. Nuances Matter in People Management

Many leaders we interviewed explicitly or implicitly highlighted a “hybrid paradox”: While in-person connection is becoming less frequent, people skills become more important than ever. The best leaders listen and show empathy, allocate more leadership time to team management and coaching, enable versus control, and invest more in building a culture that reaches out of the traditional office and into people’s homes.

This is easier said than done. Executives lamented that it’s challenging to feel the whole team’s collective spirit and resolve. One simply cannot get a group reaction clear in a Teams or Zoom meeting, where each face a is just a thumbnail.

One leader identified places where body language might matter more or less: “Two times a year, [we hold a] review of business sites where we have the whole leadership team [along with] group functions. That [will be] done face-to-face in the future also,” he noted. “In the meeting you can read the person’s body language, colleagues’ expressions, etc. Currently we lack how the full team [is] reacting. But [for the] monthly business review, we can continue to do in Microsoft Teams, as there is no need to read the body language.”

The issue goes beyond regular meetings, too. Executives must increasingly discern what motivates or concerns individuals who they have not casually observed in the lunchroom or corporate retreat. For example, we all mostly smile at the camera once our video is turned on for something like a virtual happy hour, so it will take more commitment and skills for leaders to understand employees beyond what is being deliberately projected. In the hybrid world, this deep observational skill will become an essential leadership skill. One company went so far as to hire a psychologist to observe and help teams.

Ultimately, leaders will likely need to adapt their listening and communication skills. “Once we understood that [remote work] will not go away overnight, we decided that will have to adjust our leadership styles,” the CEO of a global consumer goods company stated. “I feel that the discussions, both in teams and one on one, have been more in-depth and personal as would have been the case face to face. I am much closer to my team on a personal level now.”

As communication has changed, however, many executives noted that slack time is vital for innovation and renewal. They often worry that employees may feel left alone, but employees also feel they are never alone — their calendars are always full of meetings, largely because follow-ups that used to happen informally now must be all formally scheduled. To address this, leaders will need to learn to be much more disciplined about their own calendars and those of their teams, balancing group and one-on-one discussions with time for more focused work or rest. Mastering people management nuances like these will differentiate good and successful leaders from those who are less successful going forward.

3. Strong Central Guidance Is a Must

His defensiveness was intense. He insisted he had kept his commitments, delivered positive results, and hadn’t ever acted deceitfully or unscrupulously. And all of those things were true.

Like many leaders, he was shocked to learn that the standards of trustworthiness have risen significantly as the world’s experience of honesty and trust have descended into a freefall. The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer revealed that government, NGOs, and media have continued to lose trust while business barely hangs on as the only institution people view as competent and ethical. People’s expectations and definition of trustworthiness are broadening for leaders, and it takes a lot to gain that trust.

The findings of my 15-year longitudinal study of more than 3,200 leaders on organizational honesty for my book, To Be Honest: Lead with the Power of Truth, Justice, and Purpose, also show that to earn and keep trust, leaders must accept that reliability and integrity are merely table stakes. They don’t, on their own, earn you a reputation of being trustworthy. They may get you labeled as dependable or easy to work with, but to be trusted consistently requires more. If you want to be certain that the people you lead see you as trustworthy, here are four practices to master. My research revealed that if you do, you’ll be 16 times more likely to earn and keep the trust of others.

Be who you say you are.

Consciously or not, we all navigate the world guided by a set of values that are revealed by our actions. We may say we value compassion, but if the first question we ask upon hearing someone plowed into our new car in the parking lot is, “How bad is the damage?” instead of “Was anyone hurt?” our commitment to compassion appears pretty thin. Others judge our trustworthiness by the extent to which our actions and words match. Here’s how to make sure they do.

Embody your stated values. The first thing you must do is articulate your values so others know what to expect. Importantly, though, good intentions don’t count. One of the issues in Gabe’s feedback was that he routinely extolled the importance of teamwork and being an “all for one” team. But during meetings, he became impatient with others’ updates and was sarcastic with his feedback. Although he didn’t intend it, his actions intimidated others and prevented them from participating, so he’d lost their trust.

Your values serve as a yardstick that others use to gauge their experience of you. If you haven’t articulated them, people are left to make assumptions that may not align with what you believe. And if you have articulated them, as Gabe did, be especially vigilant about embodying them. Make a list of your most important values and for each, define the ways you intend for them to appear in your day-to-day actions.

Acknowledge any say-do gaps. None of us are consistent all the time. Identify the places where your actions have belied your values, leading to unintended consequences for others, like Gabe’s behavior in meetings. Where necessary, apologize to those who’ve experienced those consequences. Otherwise, as with Gabe, the hypocrisy people attribute to you will erode trust quickly. But demonstrating humility for the impact of those moments can be a trust multiplier as people see that you’re humble enough to take responsibility when your words and actions don’t match.

Treat others and their work with dignity.

In an economy where people’s primary output is often a reflection of themselves — their ideas, insights, and ingenuity — the importance of treating both the contributor and the contribution with dignity is vital. People are more likely to trust colleagues who graciously regard what they do as a distinct part of who they are. Here’s how to do that.

Create opportunities for others to shine. Look for ways to allow others to showcase their talent. For example, invite people who don’t have high visibility to present their critical projects to wider audiences in your organization. Or encourage those who host meetings you attend to hear a pitch from someone you know has a great idea but is struggling to get it heard. Maybe you can connect someone you know with career aspirations to people within your organizational network who might be able to help them advance their dream. Become known as someone who dignifies the contributions of others by making sure they’re seen and celebrated across the organization.

Be a safe place to fail. Fewer moments call for dignity more than when someone’s efforts fall short. People inherently trust others they feel no need to hide from, especially in the shame of failure. When others make mistakes, even substantial ones, make sure that accountability includes keeping their self-respect intact. Balance expressing your disappointment with making sure you remain an ally, doing whatever you can to help them get back on track.

 I have a client who’s an engineer and feels he’s just going through the motions, afraid that his career will always be humdrum. He asked, “Is there any chance that, age 35 (I’m changing irrelevant details to protect his anonymity), I’ll find my passion and make a living at it?”

A prerequisite question is “Is finding a passion needed for career contentment?”

As I’ve written previously, because most people hold one of the same few passions: the arts, entertainment, the environment, helping the poor, and sports, the chances of making a living at a commonly held passion are not great. And because of the oversupply of willing workers in such fields, pay is often poor if not volunteer.

More often, career contentment comes not from passion but from work of moderate difficulty, some impact, a decent boss and coworkers, reasonable commute, decent pay, and job security.

But just because passion isn’t the key to career contentment, doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to make a living related to one’s passion. But many people, like the aforementioned client, have trouble identifying a passion. Here are some questions that might help you unearth one:

The question I asked him that unearthed a passion for this client was, “What were you attracted to as a child?” He said, “Hunting for unusual wildflowers.” When I asked if there subsequently have been other things like that, he said that he had loved hunting for used navionics (electrical devices for use on boats and ships.) The common thread was hunting, so we explored a variety of careers that required some form of hunting, especially those that would leverage his engineering experience. One example: becoming a purchasing agent for a boat or ship manufacturer.

If that question doesn’t work or you, might one of these:

What do you most like to read, watch, and talk about?

What do you give a damn about?

What activity most engages you, for example, talking with people, doing research, working with your hands, making art, starting a business, handling details?

What value most drives you: money, fame, a non-profit cause, glamour?

What’s an unusual interest of yours? (The job market may be better when you’re away from the madding crowd.)

To what or whom would you donate or invest a million dollars?

If you had a year to live, didn’t care what anyone thought, and had to be productive, what would you do?

The takeaway

Career passion may be oversold—Do what you love and poverty may well follow. Nevertheless, it’s worth at least a shot at unearthing a passion and then seeing if there’s a career in which you feel the risk of pursuing it is worth it.

Staying on top of new innovations and skills will help you become a better entrepreneur and a better person. This Memorial Day, you can set yourself up to learn a variety of new skills over the summer on a budget. The Entrepreneur Store has a wide array of courses covering myriad subjects on sale for unbeatable prices for the holiday weekend. You’ll want to act fast because these deals won’t last long.

1. Amazon FBA and Dropshipping

Want to start a side hustle? Dropshipping through Amazon FBA is one of the best ways to earn passive income. In this bundle, you’ll learn how to set up an online store, source inventory, and scale your store without ever having to put your hands on products.

2. Adobe Creative Cloud

Design is complicated, which is why it’s often expensive to hire freelance designers. Why not learn the skills you need to beautify your website and promotional materials yourself? This massive bundle covers the entire Adobe Creative Cloud, from Photoshop to XD, so you’ll develop a comprehensive design skill-set.

3. Project Management

Efficiency is everything in business, especially in lean times. Learning project management principles can help you keep projects on time and under-budget. In this bundle, you’ll explore several different project management methodologies, learn a variety of useful tools, and understand how to operate your business more efficiently.

4. Mobile App Development

Got a great app idea? Then it’s time to buckle down and build it! This nine-course bundle will guide you from ideation through to getting your app live in the App Store. You’ll learn how to build apps for both Android and iOS using tools like Java, React Native, Git, and more.

5. Full Stack Coding

The future is digital and learning to code will help you stay ahead of any and all innovation. This massive bundle includes 27 courses and more than 270 hours of training from the web’s top instructors. You’ll delve into web development, data science, software development, machine learning, and much more.

With many businesses still recovering from the economic damage caused by the Covid-19 crisis, employers have to find innovative ways to maximise the potential of their staff. In many industries the priorities of entire workforces have totally shifted in the last 12 months, resulting in employees having to adopt new and refined roles.

It is critical that your managers become ‘adaptive change champions’. 

Here, we’ll discuss how businesses can present their employees with a vision for success, encouraging them to embrace and react positively to change.

The success formula

In order for employers to motivate their staff to adopt new roles they must first overcome two psychological factors that cause people to resist reskilling and taking on new roles:

1. Humans are creatures of habit, so we all feel uneasy whenever asked to act outside our normal comfort zones
2. We don’t like change because it creates uncertainty, and uncertainty is a demotivator

These two factors combine to act as a ‘psychological brake’ on people’s willingness to take on new roles, so managers need a way of taking off the brakes. Managers should learn, teach and talk about ‘the five-part success formula’, and its evil twin, ‘the failure formula’. As the names suggest, the success formula leads people to succeed, and the failure formula causes people to fail, and each person gets to choose which formula to live by.

The success formula can be summarised in five words: purpose, plan, action, setback, change:

1. Purposes are the goals we want to achieve
2. Plans are how we intend to achieve our goals
3. Actions are the daily implementation of our plans
4. Setbacks are the inevitable things that go wrong and that mess-up our original plans
5. Changes are the adaptations, adjustments, modifications and updates that we must make to our original plans and actions in order to achieve our purpose and to prosper

We must understand that setbacks and change are inherent in the system and cannot be ignored.

The failure formula is the exact opposite of the success formula:

1. No purpose = drifter mentality
2. No plans = dithering and the repetition of obsolete methods
3. No action = inaction, apathy, delay
4. Ignore setbacks = evasion, willful blindness, head in the sand
5. No change = stubbornness, refusal to adapt, modify, evolve, respond or retrain

It’s fair to say that 2020 rocked many organizations and business models, upending priorities and plans as business leaders scrambled to navigate a rapidly changing environment. For many organizations this included responding to the social justice movements, shifting to a full-time remote staff, determining how best to support employees’ wellbeing, managing a hybrid workforce, and now addressing legal concerns around the Covid-19 vaccine.

It would be nice to believe that 2021 will be about stability and getting back to normal; however, this year is likely to be another full of major transitions. While there has been a lot of focus on the increase in the number of employees working remotely at least part of the time going forward, there are nine additional forces that I think will shape business in 2021:

1. Employers will shift from managing the employee experience to managing the life experience of their employees. The pandemic has given business leaders increased visibility into the personal lives of their employees, who have faced unprecedented personal and professional struggles over the last year.

It’s become clear that supporting employees in their personal lives more effectively enables employees to not only have better lives, but also to perform at a higher level. According to Gartner’s 2020 ReimagineHR Employee Survey, employers that support employees with their life experience see a 23% increase in the number of employees reporting better mental health and a 17% increase in the number of employees reporting better physical health. There is also a real benefit to employers, who see a 21% increase in the number of high performers compared to organizations that don’t provide the same degree of support to their employees.

That’s why 2021 will be the year where employer support for mental health, financial health, and even things that were previously seen as out of bounds, like sleep, will become the table stakes benefits offered to employees.

2. More companies will adopt stances on current societal and political debates. Employees’ desire to work for organizations whose values align with their own has been growing for some time. In 2020, this desire accelerated: Gartner research shows that 74% of employees expect their employer to become more actively involved in the cultural debates of the day. I believe CEOs will have to respond in order to retain and attract the best talent.

However, making statements about the issues of the day is no longer enough: Employees expect more. And CEOs who have spent real resources on these issues have been rewarded with more highly engaged employees. A Gartner survey found that the number of employees who were considered highly engaged increased from 40% to 60% when their organization acted on today’s social issues.

3. The gender-wage gap will continue to increase as employees return to the office. Many organizations have already adopted a hybrid workforce — or are planning to this year — that enables employees to work from the corporate office, their home, or an alternate third space (coffee shop, co-working space, etc.). In this hybrid scenario, we are hearing from CHROs that the surveys of their own employees are showing that men are more likely to decide to return to their workplace, while women are more likely to continue to work from home.

According to a recent Gartner survey, 64% of managers believe that office workers are higher performers than remote workers, and in turn are likely to give in-office workers a higher raise than those who work from home. However, data that we have collected from both 2019 (pre-pandemic) and 2020 (during the pandemic) shows the opposite: Full-time remote workers are 5% more likely to be high performers than those who work full-time from the office.

So if men are more likely to work from the office, and managers retain a bias towards in-office workers, we should expect to see managers over-rewarding male employees at the expense of female employees, worsening the gender-wage gap at a time when the pandemic has already had a disproportionate impact on women.

4. New regulations will limit employee monitoring. During the pandemic, more than 1 out of 4 companies has purchased new technology, for the first time, to passively track and monitor their employees. However, many of these same companies haven’t determined how to balance employee privacy with the technology, and employees are frustrated. Gartner research found that less than 50% of employees trust their organization with their data, and 44% don’t receive any information regarding the data collected about them. In 2021, we expect a variety of new regulations at the state and local level that will start to put limits on what employers can track about their employees. Given the variability that this will create, companies are likely to adopt the most restrictive standards across their workforce.

Almost anyone can muster enough gumption for a short burst of high-energy effort. Maybe it’s making a shining impression your first few weeks on a job, hitting the gym with fervor at the start of January, or spending a weekend on a remodeling project exhibiting all the peppiness of an HGTV star.

But what about after that initial burst? Do you still feel the same a few months or even a year into your new job, goal, or project? Have you abandoned your ambitions? Do you continue to push on while fighting signs of fatigue or burnout? Or do you wildly vacillate between hyper productivity and getting nothing done?

The key to success at work and in life isn’t really starting strong, it’s staying strong. And one of the keys to having that staying power is the idea of self-regulation. This entails operating within lower and upper boundaries of activity by predetermining the minimum and maximum amount of action you will take toward a specific goal within a certain span of time (such as a day or a week). This keeps you from getting derailed because you dropped off or lost interest, or overdoing it and finding yourself too exhausted to continue.

As a time management coach, I’ve seen that there are four steps to creating this staying power. When you follow these steps, you’ll be surprised to find that you’ll accomplish more of your goals with less effort — and give yourself drive that lasts.

Set upper and lower boundaries 

The idea of goal setting is popular, especially at the start of the year. But not many individuals take the time to write out the steps that they will take to achieve their goals. And in my estimation, many fewer take the time to define their daily upper and lower boundaries for each of their goals.

In Greg McKeown’s book Effortless, he suggests the idea of making concrete boundaries for both how little and how much you will do in a given day on your important priorities — for instance, for hitting sales numbers, you may determine to never make fewer than five sales calls in a day and never more than 10 sales calls in a day.

You can extend this into any project or goal that you want to accomplish. For example, if you want to author a book, you might decide to write no less than 30 minutes per day and no more than three hours per day to avoid burning out. Or for exercise, you may decide to work out no less than three times per week and no more than five times per week, so you get a sufficient workout in  and also have time for your other priorities like spending time with your family or personal tasks.

These boundaries give you some wiggle room but also give you the ability to stay on track over time. When you’re setting your own upper and lower limits, think through what’s the least you could do in a particular area to feel like you are keeping up your momentum. The goal on the low end is to not feel like you “stopped” and need to exert extra effort to break the inertia and restart again. And when you’re defining your upper limits, think about where you need to limit yourself so that your investment in this particular area doesn’t take so much of your time that other areas of your life suffer.

Understand your tendency 

When facing a goal, do you tend to get into a high-drive gear and try to remain there 24/7? Do you operate at a low-drive level most of the time, often having to scurry to the finish line at the last minute? Do you find yourself vacillating between extremes where one day you compulsively work until the wee hours of the night, and the next day you crash and do next to nothing?

Depending on your tendency, you can proceed in one of the following three ways:

• For those in the first, “high drive” category, you’ll need to give yourself permission to be human, to rest, and to have real downtime. Keep a close eye on whether you’re going over your upper boundary of activity and headed for burnout.
• For those in the second, “low drive” category, keep a close eye on whether or not you’re staying above your lower bound. You want to ensure that you’re doing at least the minimum before chilling out (as tempting as that may seem).
• For those in the third, “fluctuating drive” category, you’ll need to keep an eye on both bounds. Avoiding going over your upper bound should prevent you from falling below your lower bound the next day.

As McKeown wisely writes in his book, “Do not do more today than you can completely recover from by tomorrow.”

Build in rest and recovery

As humans, we’re designed for cycles of activity and rest. That’s why we sleep at night, why weekends are an essential part of a productive workweek, and why even elite athletes can’t work out every waking hour.

If you’re a high-drive individual, you’ll need to remain especially conscious about giving yourself planned times of rest and recovery. Since I fall toward this tendency, I make sure that my personal time isn’t as jam packed as my work time. For me, that means viewing my nonwork time not only as time to complete personal tasks, but also as time for rest. For instance, two mornings a week I don’t do my normal 5:15 am wakeup for swimming. Instead, I give myself time to contemplate life, read interesting articles, or simply sleep in. I also consciously take time on the weekends and evenings to connect with people without a time limit — just going with the flow and allowing things to take as long as they take.

If you operate at a low-drive level, make sure you’ve at least hit your lower boundary of activity before taking a break. That means that you can still take ample breaks, but only after you’ve made progress on a goal.

And if your drive fluctuates, you’ll need to remember to have rest and recovery on the days when you feel on top of the world and like you can work 24/7, so that you don’t crash the next day. That could include the basics like taking time to eat, moving from your chair by stretching or walking, and not staying up crazy late — no matter how energized you feel. Force yourself to stop when it’s a reasonable time for you to go to bed, so that you can begin again fresh the next day.

Most people assume that lightbulb moment will arrive right away, when you’re feeling freshest. But according to new research, we’ve got it wrong. 

Across several studies, Loran Nordgren, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, and Kellogg PhD alumnus Brian Lucas, now of Cornell University, discovered a widespread, persistent, and mistaken belief that creativity drops off with time. They dub this the “creative-cliff illusion.” 

What’s more, they found, the illusion is self-defeating. The more people believe in it, the fewer creative ideas they generate. But with experience comes wisdom, Nordgren and Lucas learned: people who do lots of creative work do not fall victim as often to the myth of declining creativity. 

“People think their best ideas are coming fast and early,” Nordgren says. In fact, “you’re either not seeing any drop-off in quality, or your ideas get better.” By giving up too soon, we risk leaving our best ideas on the table. 

Nordgren believes bringing attention to the problem can help people unlock new ways of thinking. “People don’t maximize their creative potential, and part of that is because of these beliefs,” he says. 

Creativity Increases as You Brainstorm

Nordgren and Lucas began by recruiting a group of 165 online participants, all of whom had previously worked at charitable organizations, to complete a five-minute brainstorming task. Before they got started, participants were asked to predict their creativity during each minute of the task.

Next, participants set to work generating ideas for how a charity could increase donations. As motivation to keep the juices flowing, the researchers told participants they would be entered in a lottery to win $50 for each idea they came up with. 

Then, Nordgren and Lucas recruited a new group of online participants to rate the creativity of the ideas the first set of participants had generated.

Participants in the brainstorming task gave faulty predictions about their own creativity, the researchers’ analysis revealed. While people thought they would become less creative as the session went on, the opposite was true: their creativity—as rated by the second group of participants—actually increased. 

Confusing Productivity with Creativity 

Why do people so uniformly believe their creativity will decline the longer they tussle with a problem? 

Nordgren and Lucas suspected people confuse creativity with the ease of generating ideas. For many of us, early ideas come quickly, while later ideas prove more elusive as the brainstorm slows to a brain drizzle. This experience of difficulty could easily be misinterpreted as a decrease in the quality of ideas.

To test the hypothesis, the researchers repeated the same study as before, recruiting 191 new participants. This time, however, participants predicted their creativity after they had already finished generating ideas. 

It didn’t matter. Even after the brainstorming task was complete, participants incorrectly judged their later ideas as less creative—because, the researchers reasoned, those ideas were harder to access. Yet, as in the first study, the opposite was true: ideas that took longer to excavate were more likely to be truly innovative.

The pandemic has accelerated a trend that has been unfolding over the last decade. As the world has grown more digital and complex, the range of decisions that leaders need to make has broadened, spanning from big picture strategic thinking to careful execution, to advancing technology roadmaps and upskilling and engaging employees. And decision-making criteria too have expanded, increasingly focusing on ESG considerations in addition to narrowly defined profit expectations. The past year has been particularly intense, pushing leaders to make decisions for which they had no previous experience — and do so quickly.

To succeed in this new era of value creation, leaders need new skills and capabilities. Our in-depth research of more than a dozen companies that have transformed and positioned themselves for success in this new world — including Microsoft, the Cleveland Clinic, and Philips — shows that leaders at these companies sought to be proficient across a wide set of characteristics rather than relying solely on their areas of strengths. They learned how to work together with others who have different backgrounds and different ways of thinking, and they emphasized collaborating together to lead their business despite all their differences. (If you’re interested in participating in a survey about leadership, you can find more details at the end of this article.)

The characteristics that leaders we interviewed considered most important in this new era align well with the six paradoxes of leadership described in Blair Sheppard’s recent book, Ten Years to Midnight.

Strategic Executor

Leaders who want to succeed in this complex and fast paced business environment need to have clarity about what the new world will look like and what their company’s place in that world is going to be. This requires highly strategic leaders, visionaries who can step back from the day to day to see where the world is headed, understand how value can be created in the future in ways that are different from today’s, and stake out a powerful position for the company.

Being a good strategist, however, isn’t enough. Leaders need to be equally skilled at execution. They need to own the transformation of the company needed to reach the future. They need to be able to translate strategy into specific executional steps and see that execution through to the end. They need to be able to make rapid operational decisions that help deliver the path to the future.

In many ways, the digital model of value creation may require even stronger execution skills than in the past, since there is so much to do to push the limits of what’s possible.

Humble Hero

The digital age calls for hero leaders, people who are willing to make bold decisions (like shedding certain business positions or staking out new ones) in times of uncertainty.

At the same time leaders need to have the humility to acknowledge what they don’t know and to bring on board people with potentially very different skills, backgrounds, and capabilities. They need to be willing to learn from others who may have less leadership tenure, but more relevant insights. They need to be highly inclusive and great listeners to understand not only new technologies, but also new ways of doing things that are different from how they did it before.

Tech-Savvy Humanist

While in the past, leaders may have gotten away with delegating the company’s technology challenges to their Chief Information or Chief Digital Officer, that approach will no longer work. With technology being an essential enabler for almost everything a company does — innovation, product management, operations, sales, customer service, finance, or any other area — every leader needs to understand what technology can do for the company and how.

At the same time, they also need to understand and care about people. They need to understand how technology impacts people’s lives and they need to help their people adapt to and adopt the many changes that technology will enforce. This means engaging people with a huge degree of empathy and authenticity — helping them to embrace the changes and co-own the transformation.

Traditioned Innovator

Company purpose and values have probably never been as important as they are today in a world of constant change and multiple disruptions.

In the midst of uncertainty, having clarity of purpose and values helps guide organizations through their path to value creation and relevance. While leaders reimagine their company’s place in the world, they also need to be clear and grounded about who they are as a company. They need to be clear about the organization’s reason for being — its purpose and values — to guide how they will uniquely create value in a way that engages others in their ecosystems and is relevant in the future.

At the same time, leaders need to innovate and try out new things — faster than at any time before. They need to have the courage to fail and allow others to fail as well. All this experimentation and innovation, however, must not be unbound — it must happen within the guardrails consistent with the company’s purpose.

High-Integrity Politician

In an ecosystem world where companies, institutions, and individuals must collaborate to create value, being able to accrue support, negotiate, form coalitions and partnerships, and overcome resistance is an essential leadership capability.

Leaders need to make compromises, be flexible in tweaking their approach and go one step back to be able to move two steps forward. This way of operating, however, can only be successful if leaders establish trust and integrity as the bedrock of all their actions. Effective collaboration within ecosystems can only happen when the parties involved can trust one another. Customers are willing to share privileged insights and participate in ecosystems only when they can trust how their data is used and how they are treated.

And integrity will be key for managing the increasing regulatory scrutiny many companies are going to see. In a data-driven economy, integrity and trust are essential foundational conditions. These are values that cannot come from a computer — they require human leaders to make deliberate choices measured by their actions and words.

Globally-Minded Localist

Technology has erased many boundaries and distances — it’s much easier now to reach customers on the other side of the globe and to collaborate with people from far apart.

Almost by force, companies operating in the digital age need to think globally — even if only to gain access to insights and talent to serve local needs. This requires leaders who can think and engage globally, who will expose themselves to new thinking and work with people from all around.

At the same time, leaders in the digital age also need to be deeply aware of and responsive to the situation and preferences of individual customers and to the local communities and ecosystems in which they operate. Customers, partners, and institutions expect companies to be responsive to their specific needs, and leaders will certainly have to adopt a locally conscious mindset.

These are inspiring examples, to be sure—but Dashun Wang didn’t think they told the whole story. Why did these individuals ultimately succeed, when so many others never manage to get past their failing phase?

“If we understand that process, could we anticipate whether you will become a winner, even when you are still a loser?” asks Wang, an associate professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, who directs the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI).

In a new paper published in the 150^th anniversary issue of Nature, Wang and colleagues developed a mathematical model to pinpoint what separates those who succeed from those who merely try, try again. Along with PhD student Yian Yin and postdoctoral researcher Yang Wang at CSSI, and James A. Evans of the University of Chicago, Wang found that success comes down to learning from one’s prior mistakes—for instance, continuing to improve the parts of an invention that aren’t working rather than scrapping them, or recognizing which sections of a denied application to keep and which to rewrite.

But it’s not simply that those who learn more as they go have better odds of victory. Rather, there’s a critical tipping point. If your ability to build on your earlier attempts is above a certain threshold, you’ll likely succeed in the end. But if it’s even a hair below that threshold, you may be doomed to keep churning out failure after failure forever.

“People on those two sides of the threshold, they could be exactly the same kind of people,” says Wang, “but they will have two very different outcomes.”

Using this insight, the researchers are able to successfully predict an individual’s long-term success with just a small amount of information about that person’s initial attempts.

Measuring Success in Three Different Domains

A growing body of research supports the idea that failure can make you better off in the long run. Indeed, in another recent study, Wang himself found that an early career setback often set up scientists for later success.

However, as the stories of Ford, Edison, and Rowling plainly demonstrate, the road to success typically involves more than a single setback. “You don’t just fail once,” Wang says. “You fail over and over.” And while that litany of failures may make the Edisons of the world better off, it seems to thwart many other people.

To understand why, Wang and his colleagues needed a lot of information about the process of falling, getting back up, and trying again.

They turned to three massive data sets, each containing information about very distinct types of failure and success: 776,721 grant applications submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) between 1985 and 2015; the National Venture Capital Association’s database of all 58,111 startups to receive venture-capital funding from 1970 to 2016; and the Global Terrorism Database, which includes 170,350 attacks between 1970 and 2016.

These sources allowed the researchers to track groups and individuals as they made repeated attempts over time to achieve a goal: obtain grant funding, lead their company to get acquired at high values or achieve an IPO, or, in the case of terrorist organizations, execute an attack with at least one fatality—a grim measure of success, to be sure.

The three domains “can’t be more different,” Wang says, “but as different as they seem, what’s interesting is that they all turn out to show very similar, predictable patterns.”

What Makes You Successful: Luck or Learning?

With data in hand, the team began thinking about success and failure at the simplest level. Success, they theorized, must be the result of one of two basic phenomena: luck or learning. People who become successful in a given area are either improving steadily over time, or they are the beneficiaries of chance. So the researchers tested both theories.

If wins are primarily the result of chance, the team figured, all attempts are equally likely to succeed or fail—just like a coin toss, where what happened before doesn’t much influence what happens next. That means the typical person’s hundredth attempt won’t be any more successful than their first, since individuals are not systematically improving.

So the researchers looked at the first attempt and the penultimate attempt (the one right before a win) for each aspiring scientist, entrepreneur, and terrorist in their dataset. To measure improvement (or lack thereof) over time, the researchers looked at changes in how the scientists’ grant applications were rated, the amount of venture funding the startups received, and the number of individuals wounded in terrorists’ attacks.

Analysis revealed that the chance theory doesn’t hold up. In all three datasets, an individual’s second-to-last attempt did tend have a higher probability of success than their very first effort.

Yet people weren’t learning in the way the researchers had expected. The classic idea of the learning curve says that the more you do something, the higher your proficiency gets. So if everyone in the dataset was reliably learning from their prior failures, their odds of success should increase dramatically with each new attempt, leading to short-lived failure streaks before success.

But the data revealed much longer streaks than the researchers anticipated.

“Although your performance improves over time, you still fail more than we would expect you to,” Wang explains. “That suggests that you are stuck somewhere—that you are trying but not making progress.”

In other words, neither of the two theories could account for the dynamics underlying repeated failures. So the researchers decided to build a model that accounted for that.

Winter is here, the pandemic drags on, and yet, kids still need to burn off energy somehow. With limited access to the places we relied on in past years (remember museums?), it’s time to get creative. Combatting winter stir-craziness is a long game, and having a few new go-to winter activities for kids can help those long, dark days inside feel less bleak. This list of COVID-safe activities includes some ways to get kids outside(which helps build strong bones and regulate the circadian rhythm), a few doable crafts that won’t ruin your house or make you lose your mind, and a handful of winter rituals that no childhood is complete without. Just remember that unstructured play is also really good for kids. These winter activities are great, but don’t be afraid to tell them to go play outside or let them get bored. 

1. Make ice sun catchers. Fill a container with water, decorate it with leaves, berries, or food coloring, add string, leave it outside (or in the freezer) to freeze, and hang on a tree like an ornament, or near a window.  
2. Put a marshmallow in the microwave and watch it quadruple in size
3. Make monster prints in the snow. Cut cardboard in the shape of a monster foot, and draw an outline your kid’s shoe on it. Punch two holes near the top and the bottom, thread string through the holes, and tie the feet to your kid’s shoes. Let them stomp around in the snow and leave the impression that Bigfoot’s come for a visit. 
4. Make a snow volcano. It’s the classic baking soda and vinegar experiment, just inside a volcano shaped heap of snow. 
5. Put on as many layers of winter clothes as you can and then have a hula hoop contest. The limited mobility makes it extra challenging, and funny. 
6. Make reindeer food. Combine oatmeal (for taste) and glitter (so the reindeer can see it) and sprinkle it around the yard. 
7. Make an ice sculpture. Fill different containers with water and a little food coloring, wait for them to freeze, and then arrange them however your artists heart desires. To get them to sick, try pouring a little hot water on their edges to melt them and then watch as they freeze back together
8. Do cookie-cutter snow painting. Stick a cookie cutter in the snow and paint the snow within with watercolors. 
9. Play secret snowflake. Each family member gets assigned another family member and spends the day doing nice things for them. That night, everyone tries to guess who their secret snowflake was.
10. Play tic-tac-toe in the snow. Just use a stick or a finger to draw a board. 
11. Make maple syrup snow candy. It’s as easy as boiling down some maple syrup and then pouring it onto snow to cool and harden. 
12. Build an ice rink in your backyard. (It’s easier than you think.)
13. Make snow ice cream.
14. Make snow! You just need 6 parts baking soda and 1 part shampoo. 
15. Get an outdoor thermometer. Teach kids how to read it and have them check it each morning.
16. Try your hand at building a cooler entirely out of ice, à la this guy.

Dear Marv, Mareon, Murrell and Mya,

I have something to tell you. Something I want to talk about. 

It’s something I’ve mostly kept to myself up to now, and you might not fully understand it right at this moment, but I need for you to hear it.

It’s tough to talk about even all these months later, but after your little brother Marlo passed away in December….

Daddy was ready to call it quits.

Not just football, either. I’m talking just get away from … everything.

Leave the country. Move to Spain. Hunker down. Just us and Mommy. That sort of thing. Never talk to anyone ever again, never have to face anyone or discuss anything, just shield us all from the entire outside world. You know what I mean?

We were all just struggling so much.

Mom and me was one thing, but hearing Mya ask, “When is Marlo coming back down from heaven?” Seeing that teddy bear that you guys called by his name? It was beyond heartbreaking.

We always told you guys it was O.K. to cry and to let your feelings out.

But sometimes that’s not so easy. Even for Dad.

Me and Mommy tried our best to stay strong in front of you guys, and to make sure you understood that we were going to get through this no matter what. We knew you’d be watching us — looking to us for how we were handling such an unimaginable tragedy. So we did our best. But the reality is.…

I was really hurting.

Early on I’d try to act “normal” all day and not show any hurt, and then I’d just lie down in bed at night and it’d all come out at once. So, yeah, those first few days, it all just felt like too much.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

I mention all that stuff because I need you to understand the backdrop for what I do want to talk about. And that is….

What happened next.

A few days after our little angel left us, as sad as we all were … something truly amazing happened. Something inspiring.

And that’s actually what I want to tell you about.

All of sudden, folks just kept showing up at our front door. And, at first, I gotta be honest … I didn’t want to answer. But the doorbell just kept ringing.

Matthew and Kelly Stafford.

Danny Amendola.

Kenny Golladay.

Coach Patricia. Coach Prince. Other members of the organization. 

All showing us love. Giving us support. Letting us know that they were there for us.

I mean, you guys … it was so moving what they did for our family.

I’m getting choked up right now just sitting here writing about it. But back then? In that moment? I’m not lying when I say that their visits, that support….

It changed something inside of me.

I went from wanting to be closed off and isolated from pretty much everyone to realizing beyond a shadow of a doubt that our family needed all the love and support we could get.

So after those first few visits, our door was wide open. You guys remember it. Everyone in the family flew up to Michigan. Your grandparents, aunts and uncles on both sides. Auntie Leslie even flew in from China.

Everyone rallied around us.

And as tough as those first few days were, I always want you guys to remember how our family and friends came together to lift us up and help us all get through the most difficult experience of our lives.

Local businesses and restaurants sent over food and care packages. Police and firefighters stopped by to lend their support. Friends, sports fans, and just regular folks from all around the world sent us their well-wishes and shared their stories of loss with us to make sure we knew we weren’t alone. 

It was powerful. And it goes to show something I want you guys to always remember…. 

It really does take a community sometimes. Sometimes you can’t do things on your own.

People need people.

It is the central theme and the very foundation on which your business stands. Everything else revolves around it. 

When people hear your brand name, it should immediately give them an idea of what your business is. Whether this is true depends on the effectiveness and relevance of your business name to your business. Imagine a brand called “Oblivious Designs.” What first comes to mind? Fashion? Architecture? Now imagine that this brand tells you they are into food production and distribution, or that they are a security company.

Be conscious of the fact that whenever people hear your business name, they start forming mental pictures of what your business is about. Therefore, you must take due care and give proper thought to your choice of a business name.

Your business name confers identity on your business. Many businesses have failed simply because they chose the wrong business name. Choosing an effective name is vital to how your brand is perceived, which affects how it will be received in the market. Below are four clues that will help you choose an effective business name.

1. Your choice keywords are in high demand

The key element of an effective business name is that it can attract traffic on its own. Your ideal business should be solving a problem that people have. If it is, then people should already be searching for the solutions you provide.

With tools from Google such as Google Trends and the search function, you can find details of how people are searching for your business solution. With Google Trends, you can keep track of past trends in line with your business offering. You can also see current trends and determine how it affects your business and choice of a business name.

If you are looking to choose an effective business name, you must already have suggestions in mind. The point here is to plug those keywords into tools. These tools would show you the demand for those keywords. If your chosen keywords are in high demand, you are unto something.

2. Your business name options are original

There is hardly anything new under the sun. But choosing a business name that is already in use is a bad idea. Rather than impress people, this will turn them off. Worse still, you may never hit the ground running as the existing name will overshadow yours until it becomes non-existent.

Imagine that another brand springs up today with the name ‘Mark Donalds’. Not only can they get sued, but they would also earn the dislike of the larger populace. People want to see that you put in the necessary effort in your quest to serve them.

Business naming could be a tough process, no doubt, but the end is rewarding. A good brand is known for originality, ingenuity, and authenticity. With these qualities, everything that represents the brand and everything the brand stands for becomes valuable to her target audience.

Take advantage of different business naming services and their plethora of naming methods. One such service asks you to input the keywords that represent your business. With these keywords, it will generate some combinations and name options that could work for your brand. An example is NameOyster which generates names using artificial intelligence.

Another good example is Brand New Name. They offer a crowdsourced approach to business naming. The way it works is that they will give you access to a platform to run a contest and engage hundreds of talented creatives who will generate inspiring and innovative name ideas for your product and business. And to ensure that you get the best result, a prize is awarded to the best idea, driving the creatives to offer powerful options in hopes of winning.

3. Make sure your keywords are legally available

As many experienced business owners can attest, it is possible to come up with an amazing business name, start working on the brand identity creation (including logo and other branding items), only to find out that the business name is not legally available for use.

To avoid wasting effort and resources, consider the legal availability of your options. The regulatory bodies usually have a business availability checker on their portals. You can also file for a business name availability check physically.

The introduction of the smartphone means people are walking around with a very powerful computer in tow. These devices are instrumental in creating the global society in which we live. As a result, social virtual networking has ballooned and along with it the number of people in our networks that we will never meet face-to-face. The question is how can we best build professional relationships in the face of virtual networking?

To start, it’s important to remember that networking is not a one-size fits all endeavor. This applies to virtual networking too. You need to network in ways that are productive for you. Networking is important despite your age or stage in your career. Opening up your network allows you to tap into opportunities that you wouldn’t know about otherwise. 

Top tips on how to best develop and utilize a virtual network:

Clean-up Your Digital Presence 

Before you start to increase your virtual networking activity, be sure your profiles are clean, error-free and present you and your accomplishments professionally. Remember the “Grandma rule”, if you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see it, then don’t post it.

Be Proactive 

Follow 5-10 professional contacts you don’t know well, yet. Take note of what platforms that use most often. Look for appropriate opportunities to share their tweets with your followers or answer a question they posted to Linkedin. Take it easy with this process, once every few weeks is great. A stronger network tie won’t happen overnight.

Provide Value 

Take the time out to locate valuable information and share it with a loose connection. Share a pertinent news article or video clip from the local news, something to resonate with their business or service…it could be something they would never see if not for you.

Build a Personal Brand and Draw People To You

Start by sharing an article and commenting on it. Don’t be afraid to utilize technology to write and post an article to LinkedIn. When you are seen as a leader, you will see an increase in the number of people that reach out to you.

Use virtual networking as an addition to, not a replacement for personal interaction 

Yes, it is difficult to have a cup of coffee with your contact in the UK, but you can schedule a call or a video conference to discuss industry news. 

Think about planning your travel to include time for a meeting with a colleague you’ve never met. Give them advance notice and see if you can get on their schedule for coffee. If you are headed to an industry conference, the organizers might supply an attendee list, cross check it with your contacts and make arrangements ahead of time.

Tens of millions of American workers have lost jobs, experienced temporary furloughs, or have seen a significant reduction in business. The current situation has understandably led to feelings of fear and anxiety for many people. However, in times of crisis, there’s often more to the story. 

Major life disruptions are often a catalyst for a meaningful change, particularly in careers and business opportunities. Many in the workforce will develop new skills, connections, and opportunities that were unimaginable before the current crisis. 

At MMI, we know this firsthand because some of our valuable teammates came to us during incredibly challenging times. We interviewed several of our colleagues to help illustrate this reality.  

CAREER TRANSITION IN CHALLENGING TIMES

“I came to MMI in 2009 during the Great Recession. I was working as an insurance agent and paid on commission. Due to the economic downturn, I was not able to make sales because clients did not have the money and were even tapping their retirement funds to help pay bills. Since my income was low, I needed to find a position with a steady income that I could count on. A temp agency helped secure my interview with MMI, and the rest is history!” —Michael Franciscus, MMI Sr. Counselor 

“My first career transition occurred because of an injury where I became unable to walk for a time. I became a successful Realtor in a niche market, helping people with low income, bad credit, and mental or felony restrictions find rental housing. Ultimately, the goal was to help people restore their credit and become homeowners. However, when the housing market ballooned, this business was no longer sustainable, and I was left seeking stability. A family friend told me about MMI, where I’ve worked for more than 12 years.” —Damon Page, MMI Housing Counselor 

“In the early ‘90s, my husband was a partner at a music and entertainment retail chain. We both derived our incomes from this endeavor, but when Napster decimated the music landscape in the early 2000s, the economics quickly changed beneath our feet. By 2010, we were both unemployed.

“While my husband leveraged his network to start a new endeavor, I went to work for Consumer Credit Counseling Services, later MMI. Within a few months, I went from contractor to full-time team member. I felt fortunate, as the job change occurred in my early 50s at the height of the Great Recession. 

“Although I never dreamed that I would work in this capacity, I quickly realized how much I enjoyed the regulatory and legal aspects of my job. I’ve since attained a paralegal certificate, which has further increased my capability and excitement about the work I do each day. The moral of this story is to stay positive, don’t look back—only forward—and if you’re middle-aged, you’re still a valuable asset to many employers with your broad knowledge and life experience.” —Jill S. Smith, MMI Sr. Compliance Specialist 

These are just a few incredible stories of professional transition that can originate from periods of disruption. We found it to be a theme among our teammates at MMI, with more than a dozen employees expressing similar stories—some dating back to the 1980s!

HOW TO MAKE THE JUMP 

While change is hard, it’s also hopeful, and there are some things you can do to help ensure that you emerge from disruption with a triumphant story of your own. 

#1 Anticipate an earnings decrease. A career transition can mean lower earnings, especially in the short term. Don’t be surprised or discouraged. Instead, plan ahead by reviewing (or creating) your budget, minimizing expenses, and identifying opportunities to improve your financial picture. 

#2 Commit to constant improvement. New careers often require new skills, and your perspective on growth and development is critical. Training keeps your skills sharp and relevant, increasing the opportunities available to you. With that in mind, commit to taking steps to grow and advance during the downtime. 

#3 Use your resources. Unemployment, underemployment, and other transitional disruptions often come with access to services and resources that were previously unavailable. Identify available support and ensure that you are receiving the appropriate benefits. If you need help finding them, visit benefits.gov and call 2-1-1 for information and referrals to meet your needs. 

#4 Don’t walk alone. Disruption can be a gateway to new opportunities, but that doesn’t mean that the journey won’t be perilous. Whether you need help evaluating your budget, identifying available resources, or just a trained support system, reach out to get the help you need. 

Citing fear for their health due to COVID-19, and the newly-discovered flexibility working from home can bring, the study conducted by The Wellbeing Lab and George Mason University’s Center for the Advancement of Wellbeing of 1,000 workers representative of the US workforce right now, suggests that re-engaging workers in offices could be challenging.

With 85% of workers reporting that they feel worried or anxious about catching COVD-19, and 75.6% saying they feel unclear what actions they should be taking to manage this risk, workplaces need to be opening up conversations with their workers about what actions can be taken at an organizational, team, and individual level until a vaccine is available.  For example, Google and Facebook have responded by allowing their workers to continue working from home until the end of the year.

While this seems logical, if the option is available to workplaces, the data gathered also found that workers who had been back to their workplaces often over the past few months were significantly more likely to feel positive about returning to work (59.2%).  This suggests that where safe, opportunities can be created for workers to return periodically.  It is worth workplaces encouraging a mix of working from home and from their work premises. 

Of course, some workplaces have no option but to get workers back to their premises.  Given that the study found that 59.3% of workers, who trusted managers to make sensible decisions about issues that affected their future, felt positive about returning to work, it is essential that managers think about what they can do to improve workers’ confidence that they are committed to caring for their wellbeing.

Given 36.7% of workers reported that they are struggling with their mental health, in addition to providing PPE, checking people’s temperatures, and maintaining physical distance measures, workplaces also need to prioritize the following:

• Gauging Workers’ Mental Temperature – Understand how workers are feeling about returning to the workplace.  Are they relieved at the idea of getting out of their house, or are they worried about caring for their health and finding new ways of safely working together?  Make it safe for workers to speak openly and honestly about their concerns and their hopes for creating new norms around working safely and productively together.  Think about and discuss “graded” returns to work, where possible.
• Offering Free Wellbeing Testing – Encourage your workers to measure their wellbeing, so they understand what’s working, where they’re struggling, and what they want to prioritize when it comes to caring for their mental, social, and physical wellbeing.  Free tools like the PERMAH Wellbeing Survey (www.permahsurvey.com) provide confidential testing in just five minutes.
• Recognizing The Symptoms Of Struggle – Educate your workers, so they know that feelings of stress and struggle are not signs that their wellbeing is breaking, but rather a reflection of internal and external challenges.  Some struggles are within a person’s control; others are not.  Make it safe to talk about the struggles that people are experiencing.  For struggles that can be controlled, help workers identify actions they can take to address concerns.  Consider whether adjustments can be made in the workplace to support people well.  And for struggles that cannot be controlled, encourage workers to practice self-compassion, and compassion towards each other, as they adjust to the ongoing uncertainty and changes required of them.
• Encouraging Personal Wellbeing Practices – Give your workers access to short, simple, wellbeing training sessions, and small-group coaching check-ins that put simple, evidence-based, daily practices to care for their wellbeing at their fingertips. Help workers to support and celebrate each other’s efforts as they prioritize caring for their mental and physical wellbeing.
• Recommending A Daily Dose of Leader Care – Teach leaders the skills to genuinely connect and coach their people through this challenging time.  Encourage leaders to deliver daily doses of care, compassion, and appreciation for their team members.  Help your leaders understand that it is more important to care for workers’ wellbeing than to manage performance during this time.
• Planning Regular Staff Check-Ups – Invite your people to provide feedback and feed-forward in their teams and across your workplace, to continue co-creating a new working reality as circumstances continue to unfold.

Do you miss homework? SAME. 

Perhaps you’re someone who craves constant learning and upskilling, a regular Hermione Granger who’d happily use a Time-Turner to attend three classes at once. Perhaps you’re someone who feels she could benefit from understanding things a little better, even if it’s just learning how the hell HTML works. Or maybe you’re genuinely looking at a change in career. 

Whatever you’re after, what more productive way is there to use the precious time that pops up between work, family, friends, binge-watching Drag Race, and self-care, than the noble pursuit of knowledge? Luckily, nerds, there are a whole bunch of reputable online learning platforms dedicated to helping you learn a few new things. 

Here’s a big list of places you can learn stuff for free, with some available for certification if that’s what your looking for. But most of these are just for fun, tbh. And remember, you don’t actually have to do anything with your downtime right now, these free courses are just here if you need a little brain spark.

So prepare your brain because here’s a big list of the best free online learning resources:

If you want to do free courses on the big academic platforms

Here’s what’s up with some of those major education platforms and how to enjoy classes for free (TL;DR basically you can do most courses for the fun of it but you don’t get a certificate — a verified certificate shows that you have passed an official course, plus you can add it to your CV or LinkedIn profile, which handy if you’re looking to find a new job. There’s also a difference between accredited and unaccredited courses, which you can usually check in the About page of the website.

edX

Everyone knows edX, the big name on virtual campus. If you’re looking for seriously legit online courses from the top universities in the world, this is your answer. Founded by MIT and Harvard, edX is a nonprofit platform aiming to change up education and allow people to learn without the usual financial or geographical restraints. And there’s a hardcore Star Trekcourse on there to presumably help you live long and prosper. (More on that below.)

If you have the coin, there’s a whole host of different types of courses on the site, and while yes, you could pay up and do a MicroMasters program (upwards of $1,200), MicroBachelors program ($166 per credit) or verified certificate (varies), you can also just study for fun for free. You can actually access plenty of the courses for free if you’re just doing this for the good of your own brain. 

Courses to check out:

• Explore the impact of Star Trek on today’s society and technology (actually)
• Get scientific about your wine (don’t look at us like that, it’s homework)
• Finally figure out exactly how U.S. government works before the election
• Explore exoplanets!
• Get up to speed on cryptocurrencies (so you can smugly read Mashable crypto stories)
• Learn how to code with MIT
• Learn about the rise of superheroes and their impact on pop culture

FutureLearn

If you’re looking to learn a thing or two from cultural heavyweights like the British Film Institute, step this way. Privately owned by UK public research body The Open University and job-seeking giants The Seek Group, FutureLearn has teamed up with top UK educational and cultural institutions for some niche courses that you can truly sink your teeth into. They’ve even built a section of “boredom busting” courses for people spending a lot of time at home these days — one of which is a virtual tour of Ancient Rome, while another teaches you how to build your own mobile game. 

There are short courses and online degrees, depending on what you’re after, and you can access course content for free for 14-day periods, pay for an upgrade for a certificate, or an unlimited membership (meaning you can get certificates and take as much time as you like to finish the courses), which is $250 for a year. But if you want to just spend two weeks playing student on one course, it’s free online learning!

Courses to check out:

• Brush up on your first aid training, it’s important
• Dig into art crime!
• Delve into the history of British royal fashion
• Learn how weather works
• Know your shit about Shakespeare

Coursera

Founded in 2012 by Stanford computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, Coursera works not only with the top universities in the world — Stanford, Duke, Penn, University of Michigan, Imperial College London, Johns Hopkins — but also tech companies like Google and IBM to offer courses in computer science, data science, language, business and other areas. 

Coursera Plus is the platform’s paid annual subscription, which lets you access the majority of the courses and get those sweet certificates. It’s about $399 per year. That being said, most courses are available for free without the accreditation but with all the delicious knowledge. Hot tip: they’re offering free certificates for 85 of their courses.

Courses to check out:

• Learn up on your dinosaurs
• Become confident to talk about contemporary art with MoMA
• Get the jump on our robot overlords with machine learning
• Learn how to code from scratch with Python
• Study well-being as science, not an Instagram trend

General Assembly

If you’re looking to upskill with some of the preferred talents many employers are looking for in this digital age, General Assembly is a strong place to learn them. Started in 2011 as a humble co-working space, GA is now a global learning business attempting to close the “global skills gap.” GA runs a whole bunch of online courses in coding, design, data, marketing, business, and career development, so it’s all useful stuff in terms of stacking your CV, although notably, GA isn’t accredited by the US Department of Education.

GA’s full-time and part-time courses are pretty expensive (some up to a huge $15,960 for a full-on immersive course), but other shorter courses are free, like their handy coding course.

Free courses to check out:

• Learn to code for free
• Learn up on user experience design

Udemy

Launched in 2010 by founder Eren Bali, Udemy was set up as a means for teachers and instructors to create and run their own online courses. Now, it’s pretty massive, with 57,000 instructors around the globe, and 150,000 courses that you can open up on multiple devices — it’s even on Apple TV.

Most courses sit around the $15 mark on Udemy, but can go all the way up to $300. Luckily, there are free deals popping up all the time — Mashable’s shopping team publishes them often. Plus, Udemy seems to be aware of the importance of online courses in this new weird world. In April 2020, the team released the Udemy Free Resource Center, a collection of 150 free online courses to help people upskill. Plus, their courses are taught in over 65 languages. 

Free courses to check out:

• Code your first video game
• Get into astronomy
• Get clued into how Amazon Web Services work

Recently, my father died of lymphoma he could no longer fight.

“There are few people in this world who leave an indelible mark,” a friend wrote to me, “such that when you reflect upon their essence you can actually see their smile, hear their voice, and feel their presence as though they are there with you in the moment. Your father is among those few.” Every single encounter with him always left you feeling better about yourself.

The world has changed; it’s a lesser place without him.

I find myself a little lost. I’m scattered. Unfocused. Struggling to be productive. To move forward on anything in a meaningful way.

I’m experiencing a very personal loss and sadness right now. But I’m hearing other people describe similar struggles as we all experience this pandemic, this economic collapse, this awakening to the depth of racial injustice. That’s personal too.

I really don’t like feeling all this. It makes me anxious.

My instinctive drive to push past it kicks in. To plan and to-do list and schedule my way to productivity and achievement and forward progress. That, I know how to do. It’s my comfort during uncertainty.

But I also have an opposing impulse, a quieter voice, one that feels deeper, more profound, and even scarier: Stay unproductive.

At least for a little while. Feel the sadness, the loss, the change. Sink into the discomfort of not moving forward, not getting things done. In a strange way, not progressing may be its own form of productivity. Something fruitful is happening, we’re just not controlling it.

In this moment, being unproductive seems important. I think it’s what I must feel — maybe what we must feel — to allow for growth. To allow ourselves to pause in the liminal space, to linger with a question that this moment begs us to ask:

How can I allow myself to be changed?

Not, how should I change. Or how must I change to keep up with a changing world. And certainly not, how can I not change and preserve the way things have always been.

Those questions come from a habit of relentless productivity and achievement. But they miss what can be magical and transformational about this moment — our real opportunity.

Can you allow this change in your world — deeply personal and vastly global — to wash over you, shift your worldview, change you? Not with your discipline or drive, not from a self-directed, strategic, goal-oriented place, but from a place of openness and vulnerability. Not from willfulness but from willingness.

And in that pause and openness and vulnerability, can you listen — without defense — to the voices you hear and the nudges you feel? Can you find the emotional courage to follow your inklings, step by step, toward what, even just maybe, feels right?

For me, I long to be willing, to be molded by the loss I feel from my father’s death and the grace with which he lived his life. I feel sadness that I will never see his smile again or feel his strong, tender hands on my back. And I also feel excited that when I miss him, I feel him even more, and I can begin — in small ways — to feel my own smile, my own hands, showing up in new ways, more generously, more tenderly, more strongly.

We all need emotional courage because being willing to be changed means we must accept and admit that we are not in control and we don’t know. Two things many of us spend our lives scrambling and acquiring and competing and succeeding and workaholic-ing to avoid admitting. It’s disorienting to let go. To realize — to admit — that our control is really only a sense of control.

Which is why to slow down rather than speed up, to pause and feel, to approach this moment, with an openness and willingness to be changed, is really, really hard.

So what can we do to support ourselves through this moment?

That’s actually the wrong question. I have read — and followed — lots of advice about things we can do to slow down and leave space for change: meditation, poetry, walks, journaling, dream-work, and more. But these things can also get in the way because they reflect more doing. It’s trying to solve the problem with the same thinking that created it.

Here’s an alternative that has been working for me: Not doing. Or at least, less-doing. There are a few ways I’ve been entering not-doing space that you may want to try. Consider relaxing pressure on:

Your time

Walk away from your calendar. Leave that space for, literally, nothing. Not a thing. It’s not your writing time or even focused work time. Don’t fill those moments with the busy work of email and to-do lists. Allow yourself time out of time. Allow yourself to dawdle. I went food shopping with one of my daughters and she asked to take a certain road home. “But it will take twice as long!” I protested. “Who cares?” She answered, “It’s a beautiful drive.” And, in every way, it was.

Your thinking

Let your mind wander. When you go for a run, don’t listen to a podcast or even music, just run. When you fold the laundry, just fold the laundry. I’m not suggesting “mindfulness,” focusing on each fold as you fold. The opposite, actually. Don’t be mindful — that’s just more control, more pressure, more demand. Instead, let your mind go wherever it goes and, maybe, notice where it goes.

Your relationships

If you need a break from seeing people, allow for that. I have lovely, caring friends who have offered runs and conversations and I tell them the truth: I love them but, right now, I want to go running by myself. They understand. And if you do want to be with people, try doing it with curiosity and vulnerability, without wasting effort performing. If you’re listening, don’t judge or solve or offer advice. Just trust that your presence is enough. And if you’re speaking, ask only for an ear. “I don’t want advice,” you can tell them, “I just want to share what’s going on for me.” You’ll be doing them a favor too because you’re releasing them from having to know anything or perform.

When you relax the demand on your time, your thinking, and your relationships, you’re slowing down, reducing the load, and leaving space for feelings to come up. Maybe tears, maybe laughter, maybe boredom or annoyance. Maybe you’ll feel the stress of not getting things done, or the fear of missing out as people around you produce and network and market. Maybe you’ll feel joy and that might be scary too.

Is that money actually creating meaningful change? In recent years, some social scientists have argued that it isn’t. And studies show little conclusive evidence that diversity trainings shift attitudes and behaviors in a lasting way.

But in a new paper, Ivuoma Onyeador, an assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, argues that we shouldn’t give up so quickly. She and her coauthors—Evelyn R. Carter of Paradigm Strategy Inc. and Neil A. Lewis Jr. of Cornell University—reviewed the existing research on diversity trainings and used that data to make evidence-based recommendations on how to improve them.

“Diversity trainings aren’t going anywhere. I think that they will continue to be part of the toolkit that organizations use to manage their climate,” Onyeador says. She and her coauthors “wanted to offer some guidance about how those trainings can be as effective as possible, so that people who are implementing them have a realistic sense of what they can do.”

Here, Onyeador offers five recommendations for building a better diversity training program.

Be Realistic about What Training Can Change—and What It Can’t

Too often, organizations roll out diversity training with aims like “improve our culture and our company” or “shift our culture”—aspirations so lofty they can’t possibly be addressed through training alone.

Truly changing an organization’s culture to make it more diverse and inclusive takes years, not hours, and it requires tools beyond training sessions. “There needs to be a multipronged approach to improving diversity and inclusion,” Onyeador says.

Training, she and her coauthors found, is much more likely to be successful when it’s paired with other offerings, such as systems that hold workers and leaders accountable for reducing bias, a well-functioning bias-response process, and networking opportunities for employees from underrepresented groups.

And it’s important to understand that there are worthwhile goals that trainings can’t achieve.

For example, “if the goal is to increase diversity at the managerial level, there may need to be a different intervention,” Onyeador says. She points to a 2006 study of 700 organizations that found that trainings failed to increase the ranks of Black and Latino managers—and sometimes even caused managerial diversity to decline. A combination of mentorship programs and diversity oversight structures, by contrast, increased managerial diversity by 40 percent.

Set Better Goals, and Give Employees the Tools to Reach Them

So what is a realistic goal for a diversity training program?

Onyeador, Carter, and Lewis found that most effective diversity training programs help participants identify and reduce bias. “That’s what we argue is the proper outcome of a training,” Onyeador says.

It’s important that participants walk away with not just an awareness of bias, but also with specific tools to help them behave differently in the future. “Some people do want to change their behavior, but they don’t know how,” Onyeador says. It’s best, she and her coauthors propose, for facilitators to leave participants with two to three concrete strategies.

However, even the relatively modest aim of helping employees acknowledge and reduce bias may require larger investments of time and effort than many organizations are used to. Unlearning patterns learned over the course of a lifetime is a gradual process. For that reason, Onyeador suggests a series of workshops instead of a one-off training session.

Looking back on her own experiences as an undergraduate, “there was some diversity content at the beginning of the year, and then we never addressed any of it again,” Onyeador recalls. “A different approach might have been to have a series of all-campus conversations throughout the year. Obviously, it’s hard to coordinate, but it sends a signal that this is really important.”

Follow-up and reinforcement is essential. One study the authors reviewed found that accountability structures, such as affirmative-action plans, diversity taskforces, and departments devoted to diversity, produced significantly better outcomes than trainings alone. Another study suggested that, without reinforcement, bias can return to its pre-training levels in just 24 hours.

Get Comfortable with Discomfort

Often, companies are wary of diversity trainings because they’re afraid of making employees uncomfortable. It’s an understandable instinct: people from both racial majority and minority groups feel anxious when they talk about race and prefer to avoid the topic. Discussions of racism can also bring about defensive reactions among members of racial majority groups.

These kinds of anxieties have led many organizations to embrace trainings centered around the idea of implicit bias—the idea that unconscious attitudes and stereotypes shape our behavior. “One of the reasons people use the implicit-bias framing is that it makes participants, white participants in particular, less defensive,” Onyeador explains.

“It’s really important that the training not assume that everyone in the audience is a potential perpetrator of prejudice, but acknowledge that some people are targets.”

— Ivouma N. Onyeador

The approach has merits and downsides. “Some of my work shows that when we frame discrimination in terms of implicit bias, people are less willing to hold discriminators accountable for their behavior,” Onyeador says. “That’s an unexpected consequence and not a good one.”

Instead of trying to avoid defensiveness and frustration, it’s important for facilitators to plan for them. That means not ignoring negative reactions, but actually calling attention to them. “Facilitators can help participants investigate, in a compassionate manner, why they’re having that defensive response,” Onyeador says.

Facilitators can also face resistance from minority-group participants who may resent content geared only toward the majority group—so it’s essential to make sure the curriculum speaks to all participants. “It’s really important that the training not assume that everyone in the audience is a potential perpetrator of prejudice, but acknowledge that some people are targets,” Onyeador says.

Taking time to acknowledge what it’s like to be on the receiving end of prejudice—and calling attention to resources for reporting mistreatment—may actually benefit majority group members, she points out: hearing what it’s like to be a victim “can increase empathy, and help with perspective-taking.”

You know that slimy, green ghost from Ghostbusters? The one that floats around eating everything in sight?

That’s kind of what my to-do list reminds me of. Every day it just grows bigger and bigger as I desperately try to get it under control. (Anyone have an extra proton pack lying around?)

Things weren’t always this way. My brain changed during my first year of college. Suddenly, it felt impossible to remember things as well as I used to. There was so much to keep track of: homework, internships, extracurriculars, where I put my car keys. It was around this time that I started experimenting with different planners and to-do lists.

Sadly, I’ve never quite mastered the whole “productivity” thing, at least not in a cohesive way. There are a lot of methods out there for staying organized, and over the years, I’ve tried most of them: keeping my to-do list in notebooks, bullet journals, paper planners, phone apps, and hundreds of color-coded Post-its plastered to my desk.

Nothing has stuck… yet.

This year, I decided enough is enough. I scoured HBR’s archives for research on the best to-do list methods out there and pledged to give my four favorites a try.

For four days, I tried four different strategies. Every morning, I set out to complete 12 tasks that required a similar amount of effort, time, and focus, and eight of which were important for me to complete by 5 PM. The number of meetings I had between Monday and Thursday did vary slightly (I’ve noted where this may have been a factor). At the end of each day, I measured my overall productivity and stress-levels.

Monday: No list, just a calendar.

As someone who often feels haunted by their to-do list, the idea of tearing it to shreds sounded amazing — so when I came across an article advising me to do just that, I was thrilled. “Stop making to-do lists,” author Daniel Markovitz writes. “They’re simply setting you up for failure and frustration.”

His idea is straightforward. Rather than relying on Post-its or productivity apps, use your digital calendar to organize your time. For every task you have to get done, estimate how long it will take, and block that period off in advance. Markovitz argues that this method helps you better prioritize your work, gives you built-in deadlines, and keeps you from prioritizing super easy tasks.

I gave it a try. Last thing on Friday, I took one final look at my list and scheduled all of the tasks I wanted to get done on Monday. I left some spots open for lunch, reviewing emails, and any last-minute assignments that might pop up.

Filling out my calendar ahead of time gave me a real sense of control over my time. But as the weekend progressed, I started to panic. As an anxious person, the “Sunday Scaries” hit me on Saturday around 2 pm. I found myself constantly opening Outlook to see what I had coming up. Each task seemed to be staring at me through the screen, whispering “soon.”

Once Monday morning came around, I managed to get it together. When that first *ding* chimed, notifying me it was for my task, I was ready to go. I didn’t have to use any brain power to figure out what assignment to tackle (a huge relief, especially on a Monday morning), and I finished it with 10 minutes to spare. The blocked time on my calendar also alleviated any pressure I would normally feel to respond to emails or multitask. That said, I did have to move some things around due to last-minute schedule changes.

My least favorite part of this method: Not getting to check off my completed task. Checking off tasks literally releases dopamine in our brains, a neurotransmitter that make us feel light and happy — and WOW did I miss that feeling.

Tasks assigned: 12
Tasks completed: 8

Pros:

• Limits indecision
• Good for scheduling work-life balance
• Keeps you on-task

Cons:

• Scary to look at
• Tasks may get rearranged with schedule changes
• No checking off completed tasks (or dopamine)

This method is good for… people who like structure, who aren’t afraid of a crowded calendar, or who love planning ahead.

Would I do it again? As much as I love the idea of straight up shredding my to-do list, if I were to try this method again, I would approach it a bit differently. I would keep a written to-do list and schedule items from it on my calendar each morning. That way, I get both the structure of time-boxing tasks and the satisfaction of crossing them off.

Tuesday: Keep a running list but do just “one thing” on it.

Our brains start to get overwhelmed as soon as we have more than seven things to choose from. For me, this is a reoccurring issue. Sometimes my to-do list is so long that I completely shut down. Instead of deciding on a task to tackle, I stare off into the distance and think non-work thoughts. (If aliens exist, why haven’t they contacted us yet?)

The tactic I tried Tuesday, which I call the “do one thing” method, would supposedly help me overcome this problem. It’s a strategy highlighted in Peter Bergman’s article, “Your To-Do List Is, in Fact, Too Long.” The core concept is: Keep your to-do list, but use it only as a reference — not something to work off of. Every time you want to tackle a task, write it down on a Post-It and stick it where you can see it. Then, hide your full list and focus. Once you finish your chosen task, cross it off your list, and start again.

The idea here is that by selecting one task at a time, you’re more likely to follow through on it, as opposed to hopping half-heartedly from task to task (or just staring off into space).

Because of such hopeful signs, CEOs at companies that remain all-remote are starting to think seriously about how and how much to bring their employees back to the office, and how to best answer questions about policies and timelines their boards will soon ask. They realize that given all that has happened over the last year, more employees than ever before will work remotely, and for tasks that can be done more efficiently that way, investments in technology are necessary.

Less clear are answers to other types of questions that only the CEO can address because they’re more strategic and fundamental to the nature of the organization, such as: How to handle tasks and decisions which are best done face-to-face even if many employees today say they prefer to work remotely? What will be the longer-term impact on the culture of dividing the work force? When do I have to make these choices? Whom should I listen to, and when?

While specific answers to such questions depend on the unique situation each leader faces, the guidelines below may help.

First, wise leaders will resist pressure to define a policy or make final decisions until it’s necessary to do so. We are getting nearer to the end of the pandemic each day, but we are not there yet. With uncertainty about what lies ahead, it is important to avoid steps that will either create unrealistic expectations or limit options. For such big, consequential decisions, one key success factor is to buy time to gather more information and leave options open as long as possible.

Second, in discussing return-to-work options and scenarios, leaders should keep their personal preferences close to the vest. In government, top-level leaders are taught to never reveal their policy preference to military or intelligence advisors too early to avoid influencing the kinds and quality of analysis. Likewise, at this stage, CEOs should ask questions and refrain from making declarative statements for as long as possible.

Third, don’t put too much stock in data gleaned from employee surveys. Many companies have asked workers how many days (if any) they want to spend in the office post-pandemic. Some HR departments treat these surveys as gospel. Much of the current public commentary on this question assumes that after it’s safe to return to the office, many employees will prefer to remain working at home for much of the workweek. However, wise CEOs recognize such opinions often change. What people say after a year of sheltering in place may not be meaningful this fall, particularly if by then they’ve had several months of living with fewer restrictions. In the same way that political leaders should not base decisions solely on public opinion polls, leaders must look at employee surveys as one data point.

The daily challenge of feeding, caring for, and educating children is tough. Add the stress of earning enough money to sustain the family’s well-being and feeling fulfilled in your own career, and it becomes daunting. And solutions that work for each unique family can be hard to come by.

For solo parents — those who are single, divorced, widowed, or have partners away from home due to deployment, incarceration, disability, or work — the challenge is that much harder. Whether it’s staying up late with a feverish child, needing to stay longer at work, coping with a sudden emergency, enforcing house rules, or tackling the myriad of mundane decisions throughout the day, a solo parent does it alone. But knowing it’s all up to you can also be a profound, and often empowering, responsibility.

It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention. After my divorce, I became more self-reliant, creative, and flexible in my parenting because I had to step up and make it work. As the founder of ESME.com (Empowering Solo Moms Everywhere), I’ve learned that this ingenuity isn’t unusual — that solo parents often develop unique, problem-solving skills in response to their unique situations.

Here are just a few that I’ve observed through my own experience and in talking to a variety of single parents that all working parents can learn from as they navigate work and family.

Capitalizing on Stolen Moments

Time is a solo parents’ enemy — there aren’t enough hours in a day. Because of this, solo parents must identify where they can save time and prioritize what’s most important. They know they are not able to do it all and that something has to give, whether it’s a messy house, an extra hour of screen time for the kids, a shortened dog walk, or take-out for dinner (none of which impact their family’s well-being). Aware that time is a precious commodity, solo parents take advantage of small moments to connect with their children, fulfill their work responsibilities, and make the most out of their time by squeezing work and personal tasks into commutes, sports practices, waiting rooms, and odd hours. Solo mom and writer Joni Cole notes, “You can achieve good work in half-hour increments, and they add up.”

Figuring out ways to remain productive without busy work and long hours, solo parents challenge long-held assumptions about workplace efficiency and dedication. Moms who have to squeeze in a school pickup or dads who need to work from home when a child is sick are equally dedicated as workers with partners — perhaps even more so. Parenting alone inspires a healthy reframing of one’s relationship to work which is both liberating, rewarding, and instructive to those of us who need a reminder of what’s important.

Setting Up Unique Housing Arrangements

A solo mom in Los Angeles posted recently to our single moms’ group: “I am a single mom of two teenage daughters, and one is going off to college. I am interested in finding another single mom that would be interested in renting together… Maybe we have opposite parenting schedules?”

The traditional nuclear family arrangement doesn’t always support solo parent families well — financially or logistically. To lower housing costs and get help with childcare, many solo parents share homes and rentals or move in with extended family. Atlanta mom Kaleena Weaver explains, “I bought a house with a basement unit so my mom could move in. I cover all the bills, and she helps with the kiddo and household work.” Janelle Hardy single mom from Canada, opted to rent a large house so she could take in a roommate or two who enjoy being part of a family environment. Hardy also took part in exchange student programs to offset costs and have an extra set of hands while raising her children. Another mother, Lisa Benson, uses part of her home to rent out as an Airbnb for extra income.

I’m sitting in the back of the meeting, watching the minutes tick by, unsure how to interrupt the continuous flow of voices competing for airtime that make it harder and harder to get a word in edgewise.

I’m an extrovert/introvert mix by nature, but when the stakes are high and opinionated personalities crowd into a room, my default pattern is to shrink away from competing to get my opinion heard. I’ll often leave a meeting kicking myself for having contributed little or nothing at all to the conversation.

Many leaders today find themselves struggling to perform in high-pressure (and these days, usually virtual) meetings, either because their performance anxiety causes a heightened level of fear and paralysis, or because they end up having to compete with bosses and coworkers who overtalk and take up more than their fair share of space in the room. Still others work valiantly to insert themselves but are passed over or rendered invisible or silent because of implicit bias or exclusive group norms.

Whatever the cause, for both leaders who struggle to be heard and bystanders who want to hear more from quiet colleagues, the skill of interrupting can be helpful to practice to disrupt group norms and bring out reserved voices.

For example, my client, Max (not his real name), is an HR leader at a Fortune 500 company. He spends most of his days answering hard questions with polish and candor. But recent feedback from his colleagues revealed that he’s perceived as avoiding hard, messy conversations around diversity and inclusion, and he admits that when he doesn’t know the right words, he can freeze or clam up in meetings.

For two months now, Max has been trying out a new practice when this happens: interrupting. Whenever the conversation moves toward a tense or complicated topic, Max inserts himself by saying, “I get that this is messy, and I want to try to share my perspective,” which allows him to participate powerfully and paves the way for him to share imperfectly. This simple practice has helped him stay present and vocal in these hard subject areas. It also invites others to participate in these challenging conversations.

Interrupting is controversial. When we’re interrupted while speaking, we can feel disrespected, and men tend to view women who interrupt as rude. Conversational style can also play a part in how a person views an interruption, as can cultural context.

However, as we work toward more inclusive workplaces, leaders can learn how to interrupt with respect to make space for the voices that are often silent or marginalized. The following tips can help you skillfully interrupt and bring yourself and others forward.

Start by noticing.

Observe the conversational dynamics and patterns in the room. Who’s talking a lot and who isn’t? Tune into self-awareness to notice your own contributions. Are you holding back? Are you oversharing? Evaluate how much psychological safety exists in the meeting and consider the topics that aren’t being voiced aloud. You can also review a video recording of the meeting to notice the patterns that aren’t visible in the moment.

Practice speaking up early.

If your tendency is to hold back, try speaking up in the first 30% of the meeting. When we take a risk and use our voice early — even in a simple act of noticing and naming — we can interrupt our brain’s proven fear-based amygdala response, making it easier to speak up later in the meeting. Answer a question early on or make small talk with a colleague before the meeting starts to habituate yourself to speaking up and make it easier to contribute when the stakes are higher.

Pause the action skillfully.

In the book Subtle Acts of Exclusion, authors Tiffany Jana and Michael Baran stress the importance of interrupting microaggressions in real time with a simple phrase to pause the action while putting the other person at ease. Witnesses can interrupt by stating a helpful intention: “Can we pause to discuss something that was just said? I’m sure you didn’t mean anything by it, but…” This is a moment to reinforce the relationship by communicating that you want to help, calling the other person in instead of calling them out.

Be willing to get it wrong.

In coaching, the skill of blurting helps give permission to be clumsy, messy, and human in our attempt to speak our truth. Blurting asks that we be willing to not know the right words or have the perfect way to name what we need to say. Blurt by using “I” statements to ground your observations in your own experience. For example, “I noticed that Karim was going to say something back there, can we go back?” or, “I noticed that I was holding back just there about something hard,” or, “I noticed that there’s something I want to say that’s messy, can I take a moment to try to put words to it?”

Design practices for interruption as a team.

Interrupting successfully as a team requires building a group norm of doing it with skill and respect and to not take it personally. Do your work’s cultural norms welcome interruption or punish it? Which topics and people can currently tolerate interruption? For whom is it not safe or accessible? Start a discussion to make your team aware of these dynamics.

In the practice of interrupting, clumsiness and awkwardness are a sign that it’s working. Over time, you’ll find it easier to insert yourself in spaces and make it safe for others to do the same. You’ll become more adept at finding the right moment to interrupt with fluidity and humility, and the systems and spaces you’re a part of may even come to welcome the interruption.

In the competitive work environment today where we seek to have impact, use our talents and support our life purpose, it’s a no brainer that personal branding is an important career development initiative. Yet many professionals feel they just don’t have the time or energy to build their brand. One question I’m often asked after my personal branding keynotes is what are the real benefits of investing in building a strong brand? Here are the nine most powerful results of uncovering, exuding and nurturing the brand called YOU:

1. You become famous—selectively famous, actually. 

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” This is the most widely quoted statement Andy Warhol ever made. And I do agree with him that everyone will be famous, but I disagree with him about the “world” part and the duration. The personal branding angle on fame is this: You’ll be famous among the people who need to know you, but you’ll live in total obscurity in the rest of the world. Your aim should be to build a fan club of people who support you and who share your goals and values. The strongest brands turn those fans into promoters who tout their value to others.

Read the full article on Forbes, click below.

A few years ago, I made the mistake of having an argument with the most stubborn person I know. R., whose initial I’m using to protect his privacy, is a longtime friend, and when his family came to visit, he mentioned that his children had never been vaccinated — and never would be.

I’m no proponent of blindly giving every vaccination to every newborn, but I was concerned for his children’s safety, so I started debunking some common vaccine myths. After days of debate, I was exhausted and exasperated. Determined to preserve our friendship, I vowed never to talk with him about vaccines again.

Then came 2020. Fear of the vaccine may be the greatest barrier to stopping Covid-19. It stretches far beyond the so-called anti-vaxxer community: About half of Americans harbor questions about the safety of the Covid-19 vaccines; 39 percent say they definitely or probably won’t get one.

I decided to see if I could open R.’s mind to the possibility. What I didn’t realize was that my mind would be opened as well.

As an organizational psychologist, I’ve spent the past few years studying how to motivate people to think again. I’ve run experiments that led proponents of gun rights and gun safety to abandon some of their mutual animosity, and I even got Yankees fans to let go of their grudges against Red Sox supporters. But I don’t always practice what I teach.

When someone seems closed-minded, my instinct is to argue the polar opposite of their position. But when I go on the attack, my opponents either shut down or fight back harder. On more than one occasion, I’ve been called a “logic bully.”

When we try to change a person’s mind, our first impulse is to preach about why we’re right and prosecute them for being wrong. Yet experiments show that preaching and prosecuting typically backfire — and what doesn’t sway people may strengthen their beliefs. Much as a vaccine inoculates the physical immune system against a virus, the act of resistance fortifies the psychological immune system. Refuting a point of view produces antibodies against future attempts at influence, making people more certain of their own opinions and more ready to rebut alternatives.

That’s what happened with my friend. If I wanted him to rethink his blanket resistance to vaccines, I had to rethink my approach.

Several years ago, I was watching a Today Show segment about helping your children and teens create healthy habits. The subject of the piece was a notable nutritionist, whose kids were reluctant to eat their greens and work up a sweat. The most memorable quote came from one of her pre-teens who said, “Walking makes me sad.”

I must admit that, if I think about choosing between catching up on watching The Crown or walking, walking would make me sad, too. In fact, if I had to choose between walking and any of my not-so-guilty pleasures — like baking triple-chocolate brownies or shopping for Japanese pancake molds online (they’ll arrive in two days) — I would choose the latter.

But, when I think about the simplest and most strategic thing I am able to do for myself that’s Covid-safe, it’s walking. When I weigh what activity I can do almost every day, with little preparation, minimal effort, no special equipment, and that can contract or expand to fit the exact amount of time I have available, it’s walking. When I consider what I can do for myself even when my back pain is flaring up, it’s walking. When I want to do something that’s good for my mind, body, and soul, it’s walking. When I want someone’s company (physically distanced, of course) — or just want to be alone, walking works.

I walk three miles per day, most days of the week, and I’m not alone in reaping the physiological, mental, and emotional rewards of walking. In his New Yorker article, “Why Walking Helps Us Think,” journalist Ferris Jabr writes that when we go for a walk, we perform better on tests of memory and attention; our brain cells build new connections, staving off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age; we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down; and our attention is left to meander and observe, helping us generate new ideas and to have strokes of insight. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a single bout of moderate-to vigorous activity (including walking) can improve our sleep, thinking, and learning, while reducing symptoms of anxiety.

And doing it outdoors can compound the dividends. According to Dr. Jo Barton, Senior Lecturer of the School of Sport, Rehabilitation and Exercise Sciences at the University of Essex, you can improve your self-esteem and your mood with just five minutes of exposure to nature. Why does it work so quickly? As Barton shares, exposure to nature helps us switch from voluntary attention, which draws on our reserves of focus and energy, to involuntary attention, which requires less focus and energy. This allows us to recover from mental fatigue.

Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Wordsworth, and Aristotle were all obsessive walkers, using the rhythm of walking to help them generate ideas. And while any form of exercise has been shown to activate the brain, walking is a proven creativity booster as well.

Let me also say this: as simple as walking seems, I know it’s not simple for everyone. Some people have mobility challenges that make walking an ordeal, or even impossible. Others may live in neighborhoods that are unsafe for walking, while others may have experienced trauma that make walking alone or outside feel threatening. Some of us have responsibilities at home that limit our independence, and others may have weather conditions that make exposure uncomfortable or risky. If you fall into one or more of those categories — or a category I have missed — I hope you find something that you use to quiet your anxiety, keep your brain sharp, and maintain physical well-being.

For those of us who can walk, we know that we can walk for exercise and for transportation. And here are five additional ways to walk with purpose:

1. Walk for perspective. These are trying times. The global pandemic has robbed so many of us of so much, and yet, most of us can still find perspective in the struggle. On days when I need some perspective, I’ll stroll while looking at the sun, the trees, or the water. Those views remind me to reflect on the expanse of the universe, to appreciate the beauty of nature, and prompt me to consider how much world there still is for me to explore (when it’s safe to do so).

2. Walk for connection. While you can walk alone, you don’t have to. And these days, walking is one of the safer activities available to us. Before I moved from New York to North Carolina, I had a standing Sunday walk with my neighbor Leslie. And now, despite being almost 600 miles apart, we still have our Sunday morning walks — just over the phone. Invite a friend or family member to join you — in person when it’s doable, safe, and responsible — and over the phone when it isn’t.

3. Walk for learning. As much as I like to clear my mind, I also like to fill it with new and useful information. I might walk while listening to a podcast or an audio book, or even the recording of a webinar I signed up for but wasn’t able to attend. Or I might take some photos with my phone of a tree or an animal I can’t identify (which, as a native Manhattanite, are most trees and animals), and look it up when I get home.

So how do you build trust in the workplace? Kellogg faculty offer advice for what individuals and companies can do to establish their trustworthiness.

How Leaders Can Build Trust

As Harry Kraemer sees it, trustworthiness is a required trait for leaders. So Kraemer, the former CEO of Baxter International and now a clinical professor of leadership at Kellogg, has thought a lot about what leaders can do to be seen as trustworthy.

In the video below, which is part of The Trust Project at Northwestern, he lays out four ways leaders can establish trust.

One tip: make sure you take the time to understand all sides of a story or issue.

Leaders, he says, “establish trust because they demonstrate they really care about what each person has to say.”

Align Company Values with Actions

Another important step in building trust in the workplace is ensuring that your company aligns its statements with its actions, according to Karen Cates, an adjunct professor of executive education.

For example, if a company says it welcomes new ideas, then its leaders need to be genuinely open to listening to them, Cates says. Even seemingly minor details are important. For instance, imagine a company that claims its greatest asset is its people yet fails to mention employees anywhere on its website. 

“Alignment is critical because it lays the foundation for trust,” Cates says, “and trust leads to greater commitment. If you don’t have alignment, it doesn’t matter how great your benefits are. You still won’t have commitment from your employees.”

And, as research by Kellogg School professor Paola Sapienza finds, there are economic benefits as well: when companies are perceived by their own employees to have cultures of integrity, they show higher profits.

When Picking the Wrong Person for the Job Builds Trust

Sometimes organizations build trust in a counterintuitive way: by picking the wrong person for a job.That’s the conclusion of research from Daniel Barron and Michael Powell, both associate professors of strategy. The idea being that if you have promised to reward excellent work, you need to follow through, even if the person you’re promoting is not the best one for that new job.

But doing this can often be tricky. For example, the costs of assigning the wrong person to a job can be too high. And there are rarely enough rewards to go around. So how do companies navigate this without demotivating employees who feel that the company isn’t following through on its promises?

The researchers’ game theory model suggests that rewarding past excellence is most beneficial when an employee has truly excelled previously, while competing parties have not, and when the costs of favoring the party that has previously excelled are relatively low.

So while it may not be feasible all the time, the research shows that there are some situations where the benefits of rewarding past performance are so strong that they can overcome the benefits of actually giving the job to the right person. “That is where you promote the wrong guy,” Barron says.

One Way to Make It More Difficult to Cheat

Of course, another way to build trust at work is to eliminate opportunities for people to cheat.

There are plenty of ways to do this, of course, but here’s a simple way to get started: understand when people are most likely to engage in dishonest behavior, and arrange assignments accordingly.

According to research from the late J. Keith Murnighan, a professor of management and organizations, people are more likely to cheat when they are near the end of a job or a task. Under these circumstances, the dishonest behavior is motivated by something called “anticipatory regret”—an urge to avoid future feelings of regret at passing up a last opportunity for personal gain.

Murnighan and coauthors demonstrated this in a series of experiments. For example, hundreds of online participants were asked to flip a coin and self-report which side it landed on—with the possibility of winning a small cash reward for landing on one side versus the other.

The issue: he had terrible back pain and walking helped. But he didn’t want to admit to what he saw as a weakness, and because he was unable to read the room, he didn’t realize the impression he was making.

Booth, also a clinical professor of leadership at the Kellogg School, has had many clients who have had trouble understanding their own emotions or the emotions of others: the HR executive who cried when she got defensive, say, or the VP who was at a loss for how to talk to her team while the company was in turmoil.

“None of these people were showing up in a way they wanted to in their leadership roles,” Booth says.

What they needed to do was improve their emotional intelligence, or EQ. Emotional intelligence is an understanding of your own emotions and the emotions of those around you—as well as how to act on that information.

Booth shared four components that make up EQ—self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relational management—as well as strategies to develop each of these during a recent The Insightful Leader Live webinar from Kellogg Insight.

She began by explaining that study after study has demonstrated the importance of EQ for leaders, much more so than technical skills. “You can be the smartest person in the room, but it’s not going to have as strong a correlation to your success as EQ does,” she says.

Self-awareness is “that self check-in,” Booth says, where you take a moment to gauge where your own emotions are in a given moment. This is important because when we are feeling defensive or depleted or otherwise stressed, “our natural tendencies come out,” and sometimes those natural tendencies (becoming argumentative, say, or shutting down) are not our best selves.

Tips for nurturing self-awareness include everything from simply taking a few deep breaths to ground yourself to journaling in order to understand what your triggers are.

Self-management means taking that awareness and then choosing what to do about it. Maybe, if you’re feeling agitated, that means waiting an hour before replying to an important email. Or, if you’re feeling exhausted, go for a walk or do some yoga or call a friend.

And, it’s important to remember that self-management applies to good moods, too. “When you’re feeling upbeat, spread your joy,” Booth says. Send a thank you note to an employee or do a small act of kindness for a stranger. For many people, sharing your own good mood can be rejuvenating. “These are times of extreme stress, so being emotionally recharged is important,” she says.

Social awareness and relationship management follow the same pattern as self-awareness and self-management: first, read the room to understand how people are feeling, then decide how to act based on that information.

Watch the webinar by clicking “Read More”

(excerpts from Psychology Today)

Are you a procrastinator, pushing things off to a thousand tomorrows?  If you are, wouldn’t you rather be a precrastinator?  Precrastination is a playful new word I propose that literally means “before tomorrow”—in other words, doing things today rather than tomorrow.

You’re probably familiar with the familiar Ben Franklin adage that we shouldn’t put off until tomorrow what we can do today. This maxim still rings true. But why is it so difficult to put Ben’s advice into practice? 

Isn’t it Just Laziness?

The short answer is no, as laziness is not a thing but a description of a pattern of behavior, merely a label we attach to certain behaviors.  If we say that Mary doesn’t get her work in on time because she is lazy, we are merely saying that we have noticed a pattern in her behavior of failing to get her work in on time, and we then use the label to explain her lateness.  Why doesn’t she get her work done on time?  Because she is lazy.  How do we know she’s lazy?  Because she doesn’t get her work done on time.  This is a circular argument, leading us round and round, but explaining nothing.  We need to understand why May doesn’t complete her work when it is due and not confuse a label we apply to her behavior with an explanation. Better yet, we need to help Mary get unstuck so that she can break this self-defeating pattern of behavior.

…

“But I’m just disorganized “

Getting things done requires organization. We need to organize our time and the materials we need to finish a report, complete a Master’s thesis, prepare a work proposal, and accomplish countless other tasks.  You might think, “I’m just not organized” and let it go at that, using this self-label as a justification for inaction (rationalization, really).  But it can just as easily be a prompt to action, if followed up with a prescription for change, as when you say to yourself, “Yes, I know I struggle with organization.  So what do I need to do to get organized?”  A cluttered desk can serve as cue to action, to sorting things out, putting things in their respective folders and creating a filing system that allows you to find materials needed to organize your work efforts.  For any given task, create a list of the materials and supplies you need to complete it.  Organize them on your desktop and then get to work. 

10 Tips to Get Started with Getting Started

Once you accept yourself as an imperfect human being trying to do your best, and whose efforts sometimes fall short of expectations, you remove a major impediment to getting yourself back on track.  So here are ten tips designed to the prefix “pro” in procrastination to “pre”:

1.       Focus on what you can do TODAY, not on what you didn’t do yesterday.  Don’t become mired in the past.  What’s done is, well, done. Make today count.  

2.       The trick to getting started is. . . getting started.  Establish a regular work routine rather than just waiting around for inspiration to strike. Before getting started, arrange your workspace so it is free of distractions. Leave your phone in another room. Plan to start with small steps, anything to get the ball moving.  Need to draft a report?  Start by organizing your files in desktop folders on your computer. Once you get started, you may find that things begin to fall into place. Once a process starts in motion, it tends to stay in motion. This harkens back to Sir Isaac Newton’s first Law of Motion that a body at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by some outside force, while a moving object tends to stay in motion (unless it is acted upon by an outside force). If you are that body at rest, start by putting the Newtonian ball in motion by just getting moving. 

3.       Break down larger tasks into more manageable subtasks.  Create a list of subgoals. Accomplish the subgoals and the final goal becomes achievable. Focus on the present subgoal. Don’t worry about subgoals further down the list. 

4.       Start with small, easily accomplished subgoals, and build up from there.

5.       Credit yourself for whatever you accomplish today, however small it may be.  Don’t focus on things you still need to do. Credit yourself for what you did do. Don’t begrudge yourself for what you didn’t do. Just carry over any unfinished tasks to the next day. 

6.       Break down tasks into 15-30-minute morsels.  Don’t bite off more than you can swallow at any one time.

It’s fair to say that 2020 rocked many organizations and business models, upending priorities and plans as business leaders scrambled to navigate a rapidly changing environment. For many organizations this included responding to the social justice movements, shifting to a full-time remote staff, determining how best to support employees’ wellbeing, managing a hybrid workforce, and now addressing legal concerns around the Covid-19 vaccine.

It would be nice to believe that 2021 will be about stability and getting back to normal; however, this year is likely to be another full of major transitions. While there has been a lot of focus on the increase in the number of employees working remotely at least part of the time going forward, there are nine additional forces that I think will shape business in 2021:

1. Employers will shift from managing the employee experience to managing the life experience of their employees. The pandemic has given business leaders increased visibility into the personal lives of their employees, who have faced unprecedented personal and professional struggles over the last year.

It’s become clear that supporting employees in their personal lives more effectively enables employees to not only have better lives, but also to perform at a higher level. According to Gartner’s 2020 ReimagineHR Employee Survey, employers that support employees with their life experience see a 23% increase in the number of employees reporting better mental health and a 17% increase in the number of employees reporting better physical health. There is also a real benefit to employers, who see a 21% increase in the number of high performers compared to organizations that don’t provide the same degree of support to their employees.

That’s why 2021 will be the year where employer support for mental health, financial health, and even things that were previously seen as out of bounds, like sleep, will become the table stakes benefits offered to employees.

2. More companies will adopt stances on current societal and political debates. Employees’ desire to work for organizations whose values align with their own has been growing for some time. In 2020, this desire accelerated: Gartner research shows that 74% of employees expect their employer to become more actively involved in the cultural debates of the day. I believe CEOs will have to respond in order to retain and attract the best talent.

However, making statements about the issues of the day is no longer enough: Employees expect more. And CEOs who have spent real resources on these issues have been rewarded with more highly engaged employees. A Gartner survey found that the number of employees who were considered highly engaged increased from 40% to 60% when their organization acted on today’s social issues.

3. The gender-wage gap will continue to increase as employees return to the office. Many organizations have already adopted a hybrid workforce — or are planning to this year — that enables employees to work from the corporate office, their home, or an alternate third space (coffee shop, co-working space, etc.). In this hybrid scenario, we are hearing from CHROs that the surveys of their own employees are showing that men are more likely to decide to return to their workplace, while women are more likely to continue to work from home.

According to a recent Gartner survey, 64% of managers believe that office workers are higher performers than remote workers, and in turn are likely to give in-office workers a higher raise than those who work from home. However, data that we have collected from both 2019 (pre-pandemic) and 2020 (during the pandemic) shows the opposite: Full-time remote workers are 5% more likely to be high performers than those who work full-time from the office.

So if men are more likely to work from the office, and managers retain a bias towards in-office workers, we should expect to see managers over-rewarding male employees at the expense of female employees, worsening the gender-wage gap at a time when the pandemic has already had a disproportionate impact on women.

4. New regulations will limit employee monitoring. During the pandemic, more than 1 out of 4 companies has purchased new technology, for the first time, to passively track and monitor their employees. However, many of these same companies haven’t determined how to balance employee privacy with the technology, and employees are frustrated. Gartner research found that less than 50% of employees trust their organization with their data, and 44% don’t receive any information regarding the data collected about them. In 2021, we expect a variety of new regulations at the state and local level that will start to put limits on what employers can track about their employees. Given the variability that this will create, companies are likely to adopt the most restrictive standards across their workforce.

5. Flexibility will shift from location to time. While enabling employees to work remotely became commonplace across 2020 (and will continue this year and beyond), the next wave of flexibility will be around when employees are expected to work.

Gartner’s 2020 ReimagineHR Employee Survey revealed that only 36% of employees were high performers at organizations with a standard 40-hour work week. Organizations that offer employees flexibility over when, where and how much they work, see 55% of their work force as high performers. In 2021, I expect to see a rise of new jobs where employees will be measured by their output, as opposed to an agreed-upon set of hours.

6. Leading companies will make bulk purchases of the Covid vaccine for employees — and will be sued over Covid vaccine requirements. Employers that provide the Covid vaccine to their workforce will leverage this action as a key differentiator to attract and retain talent. In tandem with employers providing the vaccine, several companies will be sued for requiring their employees to have proof of vaccination before allowing them to return to the workplace. The corresponding litigation will slow return-to-workplace efforts even as vaccine usage increases.

We are in the midst of a major economic shift. While workers in the past could expect to keep a stable job with a traditional employer for decades, workers of today have found they must either cobble together a career from a variety of gigs, or supplement a lackluster salary from a traditional job by doing freelance work in their spare time.

Though you can make a living (and possibly even a good one) in the gig economy, this kind of work does leave gig workers vulnerable in one very important way: retirement planning.

Without the backing of an employer-sponsored retirement account, many gig workers are not saving enough for their golden years. According to a recent report by Betterment, seven out of 10 full-time gig workers say they are unprepared to maintain their current lifestyle during retirement, while three out of 10 say they don’t regularly set aside any money for retirement.

So what’s a gig worker to do if they don’t want to be driving for Uber and taking TaskRabbit jobs into their 70s and 80s? Here are five things you can do to save for retirement as a member of the gig economy.

1. Take stock of what you have

Many people don’t have a clear idea of how much money they have. And it’s impossible to plan your retirement if you don’t know where you are today. So any retirement savings should start with a look at what you already have in the accounts in your name.

Add up how much is in your checking and savings accounts, any neglected retirement accounts you may have picked up from previous traditional jobs, cash on hand if your gig work relies on cash tips, or any other financial accounts. The sum total could add up to more than you realize if you haven’t recently taken stock of where you are.

Even if you truly have nothing more than pocket lint and a couple quarters to your name, it’s better to know where you are than proceed without a clear picture of your financial reality.

2. Open an IRA

If you don’t already have a retirement account that you can contribute to, then you need to set one up ASAP. You can’t save for retirement if you don’t have an account to put money in.

IRAs are specifically created for individual investors and you can easily get started with one online. If you have money from a 401(k) to roll over, you have more options available to you, as some IRAs have a minimum investment amount (typically $1,000). If you have less than that to open your account, you may want to choose a Roth IRA, since those often have no minimums.

The difference between the traditional IRA and the Roth IRA is how taxes are levied. With a traditional IRA, you can fund the account with pre-tax income. In other words, every dollar you put in an IRA is a dollar you do not have to claim as income. However, you will have to pay ordinary income tax on your IRA distributions once you reach retirement. Roth IRAs are funded with money that has already been taxed, so you can take distributions tax-free in retirement.

Many gig workers choose a Roth IRA because their current tax burden is low. If you anticipate earning more over the course of your career, using a Roth IRA for retirement investments can protect you from the taxman in retirement.

Whether you choose a Roth or a traditional IRA, the contribution limit per year, as of 2018, is $5,500 for workers under 50, and $6,500 for anyone who is 50+.

3. Avoid the bite of investment fees

While no investor wants to lose portfolio growth to fees, it’s especially important for gig workers to choose asset allocations that will minimize investment fees. That’s because gig workers are likely to have less money to invest, so every dollar needs to be working hard for them.

These are inspiring examples, to be sure—but Dashun Wang didn’t think they told the whole story. Why did these individuals ultimately succeed, when so many others never manage to get past their failing phase?

“If we understand that process, could we anticipate whether you will become a winner, even when you are still a loser?” asks Wang, an associate professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, who directs the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI).

In a new paper published in the 150^th anniversary issue of Nature, Wang and colleagues developed a mathematical model to pinpoint what separates those who succeed from those who merely try, try again. Along with PhD student Yian Yin and postdoctoral researcher Yang Wang at CSSI, and James A. Evans of the University of Chicago, Wang found that success comes down to learning from one’s prior mistakes—for instance, continuing to improve the parts of an invention that aren’t working rather than scrapping them, or recognizing which sections of a denied application to keep and which to rewrite.

But it’s not simply that those who learn more as they go have better odds of victory. Rather, there’s a critical tipping point. If your ability to build on your earlier attempts is above a certain threshold, you’ll likely succeed in the end. But if it’s even a hair below that threshold, you may be doomed to keep churning out failure after failure forever.

“People on those two sides of the threshold, they could be exactly the same kind of people,” says Wang, “but they will have two very different outcomes.”

Using this insight, the researchers are able to successfully predict an individual’s long-term success with just a small amount of information about that person’s initial attempts.

Measuring Success in Three Different Domains

A growing body of research supports the idea that failure can make you better off in the long run. Indeed, in another recent study, Wang himself found that an early career setback often set up scientists for later success.

However, as the stories of Ford, Edison, and Rowling plainly demonstrate, the road to success typically involves more than a single setback. “You don’t just fail once,” Wang says. “You fail over and over.” And while that litany of failures may make the Edisons of the world better off, it seems to thwart many other people.

To understand why, Wang and his colleagues needed a lot of information about the process of falling, getting back up, and trying again.

They turned to three massive data sets, each containing information about very distinct types of failure and success: 776,721 grant applications submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) between 1985 and 2015; the National Venture Capital Association’s database of all 58,111 startups to receive venture-capital funding from 1970 to 2016; and the Global Terrorism Database, which includes 170,350 attacks between 1970 and 2016.

These sources allowed the researchers to track groups and individuals as they made repeated attempts over time to achieve a goal: obtain grant funding, lead their company to get acquired at high values or achieve an IPO, or, in the case of terrorist organizations, execute an attack with at least one fatality—a grim measure of success, to be sure.

The three domains “can’t be more different,” Wang says, “but as different as they seem, what’s interesting is that they all turn out to show very similar, predictable patterns.”

What Makes You Successful: Luck or Learning?

With data in hand, the team began thinking about success and failure at the simplest level. Success, they theorized, must be the result of one of two basic phenomena: luck or learning. People who become successful in a given area are either improving steadily over time, or they are the beneficiaries of chance. So the researchers tested both theories.

If wins are primarily the result of chance, the team figured, all attempts are equally likely to succeed or fail—just like a coin toss, where what happened before doesn’t much influence what happens next. That means the typical person’s hundredth attempt won’t be any more successful than their first, since individuals are not systematically improving.

So the researchers looked at the first attempt and the penultimate attempt (the one right before a win) for each aspiring scientist, entrepreneur, and terrorist in their dataset. To measure improvement (or lack thereof) over time, the researchers looked at changes in how the scientists’ grant applications were rated, the amount of venture funding the startups received, and the number of individuals wounded in terrorists’ attacks.

Analysis revealed that the chance theory doesn’t hold up. In all three datasets, an individual’s second-to-last attempt did tend have a higher probability of success than their very first effort.

Yet people weren’t learning in the way the researchers had expected. The classic idea of the learning curve says that the more you do something, the higher your proficiency gets. So if everyone in the dataset was reliably learning from their prior failures, their odds of success should increase dramatically with each new attempt, leading to short-lived failure streaks before success.

But the data revealed much longer streaks than the researchers anticipated.

“Although your performance improves over time, you still fail more than we would expect you to,” Wang explains. “That suggests that you are stuck somewhere—that you are trying but not making progress.”

In other words, neither of the two theories could account for the dynamics underlying repeated failures. So the researchers decided to build a model that accounted for that.

A Surefire Predictor of Success

This model assumes that every attempt has several components—like the introduction and budget sections of a grant proposal, for instance, or the location and tactics used in a terrorist attack. Importantly, even if an attempt fails overall, some of its components may still have been good. When mounting a new attempt, an individual has to choose, for each component, whether to go back to the drawing board or to improve upon a version from a prior (failed) attempt.

The Covid-19 crisis has accelerated the adoption of new virtual ways of developing leaders and managing teams. But what will happen as we emerge from the crisis?

While we will likely never go back to our pre-crisis status quo, we imagine the future will be a blended one that leverages the best of what both virtual and face-to-face experiences can offer. While the face-to-face part won’t start happening with any regularity until it is safe and possible to do so, we can be encouraged that this future is on the horizon as newly approved vaccines start to deploy around the world.

Based on our years of research and experience thus far, there are four broad dimensions of impact in management development — collaboration, innovation, acculturation, and dedication — that may prove difficult to achieve and sustain without some face-to-face interactions in the future.

Let’s quickly review these four dimensions:

Collaboration is about building shared understandings, relationships, and trust.

Innovation is about getting creative ideas out of people’s brains, exploring the ways they fit together, and collectively engaging in learning processes to refine and realize them. These require both trust and time together in non-stressed environments.

Acculturation is about creating a robust, shared company culture. This is an essential element of long-term organizational effectiveness as it builds mutual understanding and a sense of shared identity.

Dedication is about having a shared sense of purpose and feeling part of a community.

What fosters collaboration, innovation, acculturation, and dedication beyond placing people in the same place at the same time? We believe the answer is to design an immersive experience that incorporate five “design drivers.”

Purposeful focus. Face-to-face experiences inherently have the potential to generate and sustain focus. When we are physically together, it is more difficult to give in to all kinds of distractions. Group dynamics operate much more effectively to reinforce focus in face-to-face interaction: It is easier for our colleagues to keep us focused and we all keep each other on task.

Let’s imagine your organization is designing a development program to accelerate the integration of an acquisition. To achieve purposeful focus, the organization would bring the key players from the acquiring and acquired companies together in an offsite environment removed from the office (and especially from the corporate headquarters) where they can focus without distraction and without the feeling of being on someone else’s “turf.”

Interpersonal bonding. This is particularly important in creating safe environments for collaboration and innovation. Bonding refers to the creation of emotional connections that lead to trust, support, and openness among participants.

In the acquisition example, the organization could encourage the key players to exchange personal histories and life experiences, in small groups potentially supported by coaches, and to more informally get to know each other.

Deep learning. Conceptual learning means gaining an understanding of ideas, such as empowerment or return on equity. Deep learning means wrestling with those concepts, debating when and how they are useful, and understanding how subtle differences in context influence their application.

Deep learning happens when participants have the time, space, and support to explore the meaning of these concepts for their particular situations and challenges. By “exploration” we mean both the opportunity to honestly share where they are in any specific area and the opportunity to get both feedback — and be challenged — from colleagues in their group. Deep learning then truly makes the concepts come alive in both relevant and context-specific ways.

In the acquisition example, the organization could explore and deepen the understanding of the key benefits the acquisition is supposed to bring in the context of the combined companies.

Unencumbered experimentation. Experimentation in business is often impeded by concerns over turf, resources, advancement, credit, and so on. Immersive face-to-face experiences are necessary to foster the development of personal trust and bonds that allow for experimentation unencumbered by these concerns. The experimentation is done through design thinking and prototyping minimally viable products under strong time pressure and with rounds of quick feedback.

Back to our acquisition example, once a common understanding has been reached, possible scenarios can be created and prototypes of integration plans created.

Structured serendipity. Serendipity, our fifth and final design driver, refers to the effect of stumbling onto something truly wonderful while looking for something entirely unrelated. A well-designed immersive experience consists of a balance of formal and informal elements that create fertile ground for such a moment. This structuring can include elements such as the selection of a diverse set of participants, the pedagogical variety of the program, the opportunities to connect with different colleagues, the choice of locations that foster formal and informal connections, and the spaces that are conducive to reflection and sharing.

The organization trying to speed up an acquisition might try to build in unstructured time, be it dinners, walks, or shared recreational activities. You do this to encourage informal exchanges as they often lead to important creative insights, while at the same time deepening interpersonal connections.

As your organization starts to decide when and how to leverage face-to-face experiences, these concepts may be helpful in determining whether you are in need of the right mix of collaboration, innovation, acculturation, and dedication. Once you are clear on the mix, you can start designing the face-to-face elements that will be of highest value to your team.

Excellent blended management development experiences are essential foundations for both short- and long-term business success. The challenge going forward is to understand the enduring value of focused, face-to-face experiences and then leverage virtual ones to augment and extend them. While that blended future is still quite distant, companies will need to start considering what warrants face-to-face interaction and how to make the most of those precious opportunities.

For many business owners, employees are often more like members of their own extended families. They celebrate important milestones together — both business and personal — and support each other during difficult times. For many, 2020 has exemplified “difficult times,” which makes it that much more important for work families to find a way to celebrate this holiday season together.

It seems obvious that the traditional festive get-togethers and social activities, including the annual office holiday party, will either be canceled or modified in some way this year. In a virtual world, replicating the mingling and breakaway conversations that happen in the physical world is a bit more challenging. Because employees who are more connected to each other tend to be happier and more productive, it’s business-critical that companies find creative ways to facilitate those interactions as part of a holiday celebration.

In the absence of the usual parties, there are virtual ways to celebrate that can feel both natural and festive, all while using the same tools we use for work. With a little creativity, it’s possible to take those same tools we use to work and turn them into a memorable event for a year that many would rather forget. Consider one of these ideas or your own variation of them.

Tip 1: Take the opportunity to be inclusive

The classic office holiday party can create a lot of pressure. This year, there’s an opportunity to remove some of those pressures. Rather than having just a single event, try hosting smaller video chats and other activities with particular themes. Consider a virtual holiday cookie-baking class and, as an added bonus, send the ingredients and some fun cooking accessories to employees’ homes. Take advantage of “bowl season” and host viewing parties for sporting events. Consider a holiday movie night with a dress-up theme, and send some fun gifts from the company. And don’t forget to include the family — perhaps host a virtual happy hour with employees and their significant others, or fo something that includes the kids, such as a virtual storytelling or puppet show event. The trick with these types of activities is to keep them on the smaller side so that it’s easy to socialize and focus on all types of interests.

Tip 2: Remember what we’ve learned about remote work

High-quality video and voice is essential. If the quality of your meeting is poor, it will be difficult to have fun.  We know how frustrating it is to keep saying “can you hear me now?” For holiday celebrations, encourage some fun and novelty events so it doesn’t just feel like another conference call or team check-in. Lean into the visual aspect by hosting an ugly sweater contest, asking employees to provide a video tour of their home holiday decorations or share family recipes and traditions. Try branching out beyond video to share holiday family photos on a messaging channel separate from usual workstreams. Integrate multiple channels like video and messaging to host larger events, such as company-wide trivia contests that still let you break out into smaller groups (or teams, if you’re playing a game) to allow a more natural conversation. Finally, to keep participants engaged, remember to keep structured events short and interactive.

Tip 3: Recognize that it’s still 2020

We’ve all gone through a lot this year, and it would be remiss of organizers not to recognize the challenges teams have overcome while also providing a fun experience. Dedicate some time or a specific event to calling out the great work each employee has done. Reflect on the challenges of the past few months and how the organization plans to move forward to meet the opportunities of the new year. Create separate spaces, whether messaging channels, calls or other types of events, where team members can have informal conversations. Although we use our team messaging feature extensively for business at RingCentral, we also host several channels that are meant for employees to connect on a personal level, including one focused on recipes and another where employees share cute dog photos.  Those little moments of connection are helping us keep our personal relationships strong even as we’re working apart.

Some employees might not be interested or able to take part in virtual celebrations altogether, and that’s OK. Give each person the flexibility to join in activities that genuinely interest them. Use the budget usually reserved for catering or in-person parties to give employees a stipend for food, drinks or other items they might need for an activity. It’s a small gesture that goes a long way to help people feel connected to each other.

The holidays are an opportunity to reflect on the journey we’ve traveled, give back to employees and bring our work family closer together. This year is no different. Use technology as a tool for inclusivity and draw from your own experiences of virtual events that have worked well in the past. Most of all, give employees options to celebrate in ways that speak to them and allow team members to learn a little bit more about each other. Doing so can leave a positive, lasting impact on your company’s culture moving into the new year.

That’s the advice from Carter Cast, a clinical professor of entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School. “We talk about inspirational leadership and brave leadership, and I’m all for it,” he says. “But the power and strength of good management doesn’t always get enough attention.” 

After all, strong managers coax high productivity out of their teams; they also free the executive team from much of the day-to-day operations so they can focus on more tactical issues.

“Within a company, leaders create a vision, and managers create goals and lead their group toward common objectives related to that vision,” Cast says. “You can make a strong case that the real pulse of a company is its management layer.” 

So what does it take to become a strong manager? Cast offers five tips.

Communicate Clearly

As the lynchpin and catalyst between the company’s senior leadership and its frontline workers, the manager must be able to communicate directions, expectations, and the company leadership’s position. Managers need to be clear about what they are asking people to do and why.

First and foremost, managers need to help their team members envision what success looks like for their group. Cast says, “If I were to ask a manager’s various team members to name 1) their department’s top two objectives for the quarter and 2) the metrics by which they are measuring those objectives’ success, would they all say the same thing to me? If the answers I’d get back are different, then that manager isn’t communicating their priorities clearly.

“You need to know that your team members are all aligned on what’s critical to accomplish for the good of the team,” Cast says. 

As for communicating with individual team members, Cast sees this as an essential part of coaching and development and suggests organizing each one-on-one meeting into three parts: performance indicators, progress on initiatives, and people. 

So, in an hour-long meeting, the first 20 minutes might include a review of the performance dashboard agreed upon at the beginning of the quarter or year. The second 20 minutes would be a conversation about progress on key initiatives, focusing on resource needs and any barriers the manager may need to help lower in order to complete the initiative on time. The final 20 minutes would then be dedicated to personnel moves, opportunities, and issues, including the team member’s own career development.

Cast suggests that managers ask direct reports to come prepared to each meeting with a one-page summary of updates from these discussion topics. “I always write all over that piece of paper in the meetings as we talk,” he says. “Then, I later I pull those sheets out when I am working on performance reviews. They are a good way to remind myself of what was accomplished over the course of the year. I’m able to see things that they did really well, as well as things they weren’t able to accomplish.”

Take Ownership of the Process 

As the people responsible for goal setting within the organization, managers should always be thinking about how they will measure success—and how they will hold their teams accountable for those metrics and timelines. This requires collaboration between the manager and the team members on identifying the best route to those goals. 

“Average managers think their job is to stay in their lane and facilitate the execution of initiatives. Great managers do that, but they also scratch their heads and say, ‘Is there a better way to do this? I’m going to look into that,’” Cast says. 

For a manager, simply stating that sales goal isn’t going to help you or your team reach it. Holding people accountable starts with outlining all the steps you will take to get there, including clearly defining both the critical “leading” and “lagging” measures of that goal. Cast notes that while both types of measures are important, leading measures tend to be more actionable. 

“If a team’s goal is $50 million in sales, a lagging measure of that goal might be the number of new customers you acquired that quarter,” Cast says. “A leading measure would be anything that impacts that customer acquisition, for instance, the number of software demos that each sales person executes. Then the whole team can be accountable by, say, working to run five demos per salesperson per week.”

Get Involved and Add Value

Of course, strong managers are not simply process facilitators. Most have technical expertise within the area their team is operating. So to get the most out of their teams, they have to know when to get directly involved. This might mean stepping in at a time when the team is struggling, or taking the lead on an important initiative related to their personal area of expertise. 

“Great managers roll up their sleeves and work alongside the team when necessary,” Cast says. “The more you understand your team’s work, the better you’ll be at analyzing and improving it. And the best way to understand it is by diving in and doing it.”

When he was the president of a division of Walmart, Cast arrived early to a national meeting of store managers. Employees were busy setting up displays in a full-scale store that was being assembled inside the Kansas City convention center. When he walked through the simulated Walmart store, he noticed that the merchandising team had fallen behind in assembling a set of display racks for new products.

“The more you understand your team’s work, the better you’ll be at analyzing and improving it. And the best way to understand it is by diving in and doing it.”

— Carter Cast

In the wake of the coronavirus, unemployment in the U.S. has surged and gig workers haven’t been spared. According to a recent survey, some 89 percent¹ of gig workers and self-employed are now looking for a new source of income. For many, demand for their service diminished. For others, the competition heated up because there have been so many more people looking for work.

“We’ve definitely seen an increase in the number of people searching for remote and flexible jobs during the COVID-19 crisis,” says Sara Sutton, founder and CEO of Boulder, Colo.-based FlexJobs², a premium job search service that helps professionals find flexible work, such as part-time and full-time remote work and freelance options.

But there is good news: In recent weeks, Sutton has seen a “steady increase” in month-over-month remote job listings posted to FlexJobs. “If history is any indicator, there’s a good possibility that remote freelance jobs will continue to increase just like we saw in the last recession,” she says. “The current economic conditions are uncertain, and companies often turn to freelancers when it’s not possible for them to take on a full-time or part-time employee due to that uncertainty.”

Sutton says the fields that are particularly strong right now in hiring for freelance work include computer and IT, software development, education and training, bilingual, accounting and finance, writing, medical and health, customer service, and project management.”

Opportunity is out there—if you know how to stand out from the swelling competition. Read on for smart tips about successfully navigating the newly crowded gig economy and having a sustainable future as a full-time freelancer or solopreneur—especially with services like VSP Individual Vision Plans on your side.

1. Highlight your previous remote work and education.

When you’re applying for a remote job—whether it be a freelance project, an ongoing gig, etc.—you’ll want to make sure to mention your previous remote work or learning experience throughout your resume and on your LinkedIn profile to help “make you stand out from a big crowd of people who are seeking remote work without that experience right now,” Sutton says.

The same goes for solopreneurs with their own brands, except you’ll want to make sure this information is detailed on your website and social media pages like Facebook and Google business listing.

This information can include partial and fully remote work, earning any certificates or degrees online, and time you’ve spent collaborating and communicating with people across time zones using email, phone, web conferencing, and other remote tools, Sutton says.

2. Detail your communication abilities when talking with potential clients. 

A lot of companies and clients are new to remote work and hiring. As such, many appreciate people who are outstanding communicators both in writing and verbally, Sutton says. “Mention your communication skills and the tools you use to stay in touch in your applications, portfolios, online profiles, and in discussions with potential employers.”

Part of this is reaching out in the first place. With the competition for work as high as it is, you can’t afford to be hesitant about contacting old contacts. “Reach out to previous clients to let them know you’re available and, if applicable, bring them up to speed on some of the projects you’ve worked on so they know what you’re currently capable of,” Sutton says. Take it a step further and start making new contacts as well—online and even in-person when possible, given social distancing measures. The more people who know you’re for hire, the better.

3. Research and vet the sites you use to find freelance and remote jobs.

There are a huge variety of sources for freelance jobs so it’s important to research those sources and evaluate them for your own needs. “Are there several websites, clients, recruiting agencies, and other sources that you’ve used reliably, or that fellow freelancers highly recommend,” Sutton says. “Concentrate your efforts on those sources to maximize your chances for success.” 

But positive events can lead to post-traumatic growth, too: landing a new job, having a new baby, or falling in love. And, according to research, the jolts we feel from these positive disruptive events can energize us, boost our self-esteem, deepen our relationship with others, and enhance the meaning of our lives.

Over the years, through my academic research and consulting, I’ve developed a process for achieving personal growth through positive trauma called the Positive Method. Building on a well-established technique called Reflected Best-Self Exercise, my process is akin to listening to your friends, co-workers, and family eulogize you. No, this doesn’t involve faking your own death. But the process will probably make you feel vulnerable, squeamish, and uncomfortable. The task involves reaching out to people who mean the most to you of times, sharing anecdotes of when they made an impact, and asking them to share memories of you being the best version of yourself. You end up with a personal highlight reel: a set of memories of you at your very best.

If this makes you nervous, you’re not alone. In my structured interviews of people who completed the Positive Method, more than half of the people I spoke with, from Seoul and Sydney to New Jersey, spontaneously mentioned the cultural resistance to focusing on people’s unique strengths. Why? Over the years, I’ve become convinced that our allergic reaction is because we’re afraid that if we focus on people’s positive contributions, we’ll make them arrogant. I can tell you, this fear is misplaced when it comes to the Positive Method. In fact, the opposite is true. People feel inspired and energized to use their strengths even more, and give more to others, after reading their highlights.

Ironically, what makes the Positive Method so effective is how uncomfortable it is. Because it questions our basic assumptions, it can shift your controls from autopilot to manual. Often, we don’t notice how our negative assumptions and negative self-talk become our default setting. This can make life seem like a daily struggle. We spiral downward and find ourselves in ruts that hold us back from our potential. But by building a personal highlight reel, it’s possible to jolt yourself into a more positive cycle and create real personal change. Once you can see how others perceive you when you make your best impact, you’ll be more likely to maximize and build upon the unique strengths that make you exceptional.

The process, which I detail in my book Exceptional, is also adaptable to your needs. You can make this your own personal project or a team activity, or, if you’re a boss, you can choose to send notes of appreciation to your direct reports. Here’s the full process:

Give before you receive. Before you ask for feedback, send your notes of appreciation and gratitude to people in your life: parents, colleagues, bosses, kids, friends, siblings. This will begin a virtuous cycle of gratitude. Block off 15 minutes to brainstorm about each person’s unique strengths. Pretend you are going to speak at his or her eulogy, and jot down what makes this person so special to you. Dredge your memories for a few specific times that this person was using his or her character traits to make a great impact.

As you craft your notes, remember that human brains are built for stories — not facts and over-generalizations. So, rather than simply offering praise (“You’re so smart” or “You’re great with kids”), write a story about specific event that was impactful to you. Adding personal touches will help others relive those memories.

When I started at this job, as a recent college grad with little experience, I really appreciated everything you did for me. You were right by my side, giving me great projects, calming my nerves before my presentation to Melinda, putting up with my pesky questions about Excel, and introducing me to the homemade potato chips from Jules’s. 

From there, I would detail how the person affected you, and how their strengths — in the above case, the person’s kindness and mentorship — was meaningful to you.

Next, when you’re ready to send your notes stories out, write something like this:

Based on an article I read, I’ve been thinking about ways I can improve my relationships. I don’t know if you know this, but you are an important person in my life. I want to share some memories with you about when I’ve seen you at your best. Then, if you are willing, I’d love to learn about a few times when you saw me making my best impact. 

I can remember a time when… [add your story]

Don’t send out all the notes at once. You’ll feel more positive emotions if you spread your writing out across two weeks. Once you get started you may find you want to write more than one story for some people.

Don’t undervalue the impact of showing gratitude. The evidence suggests that people will love hearing your memories, and will want to give back. That’s how the emotion of gratitude creates upward spirals, and it’s why you’ll become closer to the people you reached out to after this exercise.

Embrace Your Emotions — Then Get to Work. As people send you their memories, save them up and read them all in one sitting to maximize their impact. Reliving those memories, especially if they span decades, can be a truly emotional experience.

Jolts of positive trauma emerged in many of my interviews with people who had constructed their personal highlight reels. Take 48-year-old Louise, a high-powered partner in a global consulting firm in Chicago. It is not easy to earn partnership as a woman in a masculine business environment, and Louise is not often prone to sentimentality. However, after reading her highlight reel, Louise told me:

I think I was more emotional than happy. Happy is not the right word. Touched. Yes, really touched. Moved. I think, rationally, I kind of knew everything they wrote. But the fact that they tell you with their own words, what they’ve seen, and how great you are, is very touching.

Throughout the interviews I conducted, what I heard again and again, across diverse age groups and national cultures, was a sense of positive trauma. People regularly use words like “intensity,” “surprised,” “amazed,” “stunned,” “touched,” and “wonder.”

Truthfully, even if your physical location is thriving, there’s no reason to shy away from starting an online revenue stream. It’s nowhere near as intimidating, difficult or time-consuming as you may think. Plus, there’s no better way to exponentially increase your income and impact than by offering online services. 

In fact, these days, a strong online presence is imperative. Did you know that online sales increased by nearly 50 percent earlier this year? That means even people who haven’t been accustomed to shopping online are now getting very comfortable with it. And with the fate of millions of small businesses in question, why not take matters into your own hands? 

Here are a few of the fastest and easiest ways to start making money online — today.

1. Offer live workshops

Free, live workshops are the bread and butter of digital marketing. If you’ve never done one before, they can seem intimidating. But think of the opportunity here — you can reach thousands of people with one single presentation. 

These workshops are often referred to as master classes. And contrary to popular belief, you don’t need any sort of fancy tech to make them happen. My last master class hosted over 52,000 women and used only Facebook Live to pull it off. The bottom line: If you have a Facebook account, you can start marketing your business online.

The key here is to show off your knowledge and expertise without giving everything away. When your clients see how much you have to offer for free, they can’t help but wonder what else you have up your sleeve. 

At the end of the master class, have a killer pitch prepared. Direct your attendees to your signature course, program or membership.

2. Create a membership

Imagine a place where you gather your clients in one place, but it’s completely online. You provide resources, access to a few other experts and educational content — and clients pay you each month to be a part of this group. These kinds of groups aren’t difficult to create, either. You can have your membership site up and running with a few clicks of a mouse.

This is where online marketing starts to build up predictable, scalable revenue. Which is what we all want, right? Memberships are amazing, because you’re always working on a one-to-many framework. Gone are the days of seeing clients one-on-one and repeating yourself over and over. You can help so many more people at once, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see the people in your membership thrive and create relationships within the community. 

As Covid-19 grew into a pandemic, Michael Schaffer, a father of three in a dual-working household, worried a lot: about his parents in Delaware; about his highly creative, curious, and social kids, who’d had to switch to remote learning; and even about his dog, who was now sharing the home with everyone 24/7. But what Mike did not worry about was his role at Edelman, where he was Senior Vice President, Digital + Corporate. While friends, family, and colleagues all around him had to suddenly adjust to remote work, he’d already been doing it for close to 18 months. That’s how long it had been since he and his family had moved from Washington, DC, to Los Angeles for his wife’s career. Edelman was committed to supporting the shifting needs of its employees and their families, even if they had to relocate, and to that end the company had put in place a set of technologies, protocols, tools designed to help enable remote work — which had made it possible for Mike to move to Los Angeles with his family but still stay on the DC team that he loved. He felt lucky.

The It’s Working Project, where I make sense of the challenging and ever-evolving intersection between work and caregiving, has interviewed employees and HR departments about how their workplace dynamics are shifting during Covid. It’s important that workplaces get this right, because although one-third of the US workforce is considered essential and has been on the job through the Covid-19 pandemic, most of the rest of American workers have shifted to remote work, some of them probably permanently. It’s been a bumpy experience for many employers and workers, especially parents, but in recent conversations with Mike and others I’ve noticed a compelling pattern: The workplaces that are thriving today are those that had already invested in family-centric policies and are building on what they’d learned.

As late as February, when companies committed themselves to family-friendly benefits by offering flexible work days, back-up-care reimbursement, and remote working options, and by prohibiting end-of-day meetings, they typically did so in the name of recruitment, retention, and brand culture. But no longer. Some of these programs grew out of the economic realities of a formerly low unemployment rate, they’ve left organizations well positioned for the quickly shifting workplace dynamics of Covid-19. To understand how — and why — I’ve begun collecting the stories of workers.

Let’s consider a few here.

Emma Patti Harris, Education Week 
Employees at Education Week, a U.S. news organization covering K-12 education, have worked flex-schedules for a long time. Among those employees is Emma Patti Harris, a deputy managing editor who often works from home while caring for a toddler son. When I talked to Emma about her arrangement, she praised the culture of flexibility and support at Education Week, and she told me that the company had provided her and other employees with the right tools and technology to make their individualized schedules work. The arrangement, Emma said, allowed her to find a work-life fit that encouraged her to focus on all she valued and embraced, and she felt grateful that the company listened so carefully to what its employees needed to make their caregiving and work lives intersect.

When Covid-19 hit, the entire team at Education Week made a smooth transition to remote work. Live, on-line documents allowed colleagues to share calendars and identify deadlines, and Slack helped to manage active communications. But that didn’t mean Education Week’s work was done. Leadership went back to the listening skills that they had used to set up remote-work opportunities so long ago and asked what employees needed to make it through this crisis. This took the form of a robust survey, whose results indicated that employees needed better work stations at home. So employees were provided a stipend for equipment and supplies.

The company also worked to ensure that employees remained connected once they were working from home. It lifted old restraints and restrictions, and the result was that employees were able to do work during the pandemic that far exceeded expectations.

Kate Judge, Spoken Layer 
Kate Judge, a mother of two who is the director of brand partnerships at Spoken Layer, told me that before the pandemic, a big part of her personal identity and her enjoyment at work  came from her relationships with her co-workers, and from just spending time in the city and commuting to and from work. Life got complicated for Kate in the early months of 2020, however, when she fell ill with pneumonia, had to help her mother undergo a hip replacement, and had to manage at home while her husband commuted twice monthly to New Haven, where he had just started in a senior-executive MBA program at Yale. Soon, because of the pandemic, she also had to pull her kids from day-care. Normally, her mother would have helped her at home with the kids, but she was at high-risk for Covid and so couldn’t.

One of Spoken Layer’s great strengths, Kate told me, was its workplace community. And so she was not surprised when, early in the pandemic, after the company’s CEO, Andy Lipset, had sent workers home and permanently closed its New York headquarters, he had the company offer employees a generous allowance for home offices that included desks, room decorations, and even snacks — really anything to make the experience of working from home more positive. When that happened, Kate said, “I had a feeling of security. There was clear communication and understanding that no one really knew what would happen next, but Andy was not going to create any uncomfortable situations, and I felt grateful.”

During this trying period, Spoken Layer worked in myriad ways to maintain camaraderie and connection. The company provided lunch-and-learn programming, for example, and even by organized Starch Madness, in which employees bracketed out the best way to serve a potato. Such offerings were always optional and respectful of time; often the point was simply to give employees ways to laugh things out. Such efforts—rooted in the company’s long history of attending to the needs of employees as they move through parenthood, caregiving, and other demanding moments at the intersection of life and work—led to a very smooth and effective transition.

They know how to listen to what employees need. In my experience, the companies that create supportive cultures for working parents and caregivers do so by first listening to what their employees need. Those that bypass this step risk missing important nuances of employees’ lives. For example, many parents find it difficult and stressful to attend late afternoon meetings. Putting a moratorium on these meetings is a win-win. It doesn’t cost the company anything and caregivers feel supported. What I’ve observed recently is that companies that were good at listening in this way before Covid, have been able to continue listening through the pandemic, which positions them to respond rapidly to their employees shifting needs, as happened for Emma at Education Week, and Kate at Spoken Layer.

They know how to create community. The “water-cooler culture” that emerges naturally in an office—in the form of hallway conversations, quick catch-ups over tea, shared birthday celebrations, and more—contributes greatly to the feeling of community in the workplace. But the pandemic has made many of these things a distant memory. The companies that are adapting most successfully are those that recognize and acknowledge the role that such modes of connection play in a caregiving culture, and that therefore work to provide employees with new ways of connecting remotely, as with the lunch-and-learn program at Spoken Layer and the socializing via Zoom that Edelman encourages its employees to do.

They respect the many roles that employees fill. Organizations that had already committed to cultivating a community of respect for working family members were the ones best prepared for real-time Covid shifts. That’s become clear in the interviews I’ve done for the It’s Working Project, which have revealed successful approaches not only to childcare but also to caring for sick spouses and the elderly, where needs can often arise suddenly and unexpectedly. Companies that have experience helping employees cope with the many jobs they’re called upon to do, at work and at home, have tended to be those that have best supported their employees during the dramatic changes that have taken place during the past six months. The team at Education Week showed Emma that they respected her working parenthood when they welcomed her son on their Zoom calls. This respect for the life of a working parent during a pandemic– at home with kids requiring energy and focus with no obvious end in sight– was a powerful gift.

They know how to trust their employees and colleagues. The It’s Working Project has long supported the private sector in building and maintaining a sincere, transparent caregiving culture by championing parental leave policies with a gradual, multi-month return, in lieu of the typical expectation of returning to work at the end of 12 weeks. The same is true of parental caregiving, where often the role of managing an adult parent after a fall or a stroke is suddenly thrust upon an employee. In working on these policies, we’ve learned that the key building block to making this type of leave work is trust. Uncertainty abounds during this pandemic, but one thing has emerged clearly during my interviews: Employees who feel that their managers trust them to get things done — in whatever way they can, given the demands they’re coping with at home — are those who report the highest levels of job satisfaction.

What do a human rights negotiation in Afghanistan, a crisis negotiation in Calgary, and a business dispute between a Brazilian and a Frenchman have in common?  At first blush, nothing.  However, when we dig deeper into these high-stakes negotiations, there is a common thread that connects them all.  The concept of face.

What exactly is face?  In their classic work on politeness, Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson define face as “the public self-image that every member of a society wants to claim for himself/herself.” Put differently, face is how people want to be perceived and connected to identity and dignity.  When it comes to negotiation, it is about both sides preserving their and their organizations’ reputations.

To understand the critical nature of face to negotiation success, consider the three cases I just mentioned, which I feature in my new book.

Afghanistan – Freeing Hostages

In 2002, Karen was working for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as a senior protections officer in the Western province of Herat. One day, as she was conducting a training in a nearby village and on a lunch break, someone from the kitchen at the Foreign Ministry satellite office slipped her a handwritten note on a crumpled piece of paper. It claimed that 20 to 25 Iranian girls and women were being held hostage in a nearby village.

Based on this lead, Karen and her team began investigating. They tracked down the informant, who explained that he knew about this situation because he’d been giving these women food. He’d been reluctant to talk for fear of retribution (which would have been imprisonment or death) but felt he had to risk it.

Karen and her team wanted to bring this matter to the attention of the Foreign Ministry, but it seemed as if people in it might be involved. An advocacy-oriented approach — that is, publicly calling attention to the issue and applying pressure from the outside — would have caused a loss of face for local officials and hopes for a deal would be lost.

Instead Karen and her team approached their contacts privately, noting that, because this situation had been brought to their attention, they had a duty to explore it. The Foreign Ministry granted them permission to visit the women. After many meetings and other negotiations, the women were freed — some transferred to a safe house in Kabul while others returned to their homes in Iran. It turns out that the Foreign Ministry recognized they had a problem on their hands and the UNHCR team was providing them with a face-saving way out.

Calgary – A Crisis Negotiation

A number of years ago, a crisis negotiator named Gary received a call in the evening.  It was a police dispatcher, who explained that a man of indigenous origin (native Canadian) in his mid-30 and high on methamphetamine was threatening suicide. His wife, who was also an addict, had checked herself into a rehabilitation clinic to get clean, but the man had refused to join her, and now, amped up on drugs, he was upset. He’d driven to the clinic with a rope, found the big tree that his wife had mentioned was right outside her window, and intended to hang himself.  A passerby had seen him; worried, they called 911.

When Gary arrived on the scene, the man was sitting up in the branches. “Hey friend, what is it going to take to get you out of this tree?” he asked. “The only way I will come down is in a body bag” was the terse reply.

An hour or two of small talk later, Gary tried again: “What is it going to take to get you out of this tree?” The man thought for a minute. “If you can guess my native Canadian name I will come down.”

That was the breakthrough Gary needed. He asked for a few minutes to think it over, stepped back to his car, and quietly got the dispatcher on the phone. “Call his wife’s room and find out his native Canadian name,” he directed. A few minutes later, a message came back.

Gary returned to the tree and said, “I think your name is Running Buffalo.” Immediately, the man threw the noose from his neck and scampered down. Gary took him to the ambulance on scene and, as he warmed up, asked why he’d insisted on the name-guessing game. “Well,” the man said, “I really wanted to come down, but I felt if I did you would win, and I would lose. I wanted to put you through a hoop so that I could be on par with you.” This was the face-saving way out.

Brazil and France – A Business Tug-of-War

Two international executives, one Brazilian, the other French, had become embroiled in a high-stakes dispute over a company in which they were both involved.  Both men were spending many millions of dollars to try to beat the other in a tense and destructive negotiation, and neither would back down.  Enter an advisor, William. After much digging and exploration, he found that, beyond the money and control, each man also wanted freedom and respect. Each wanted to go back to his normal life of doing business and spending time with family and come out of the fight with his head held high.

William advised them both to focus on maximizing those metrics as their benchmark for success.  When they did so, an agreement emerged where one man agreed to leave the board of the company, giving his counterpart the ability to run it as he saw fit. In return, he released the departing executive from a three-year non-compete clause, giving him the freedom to conduct other business, and exchanged his voting shares for non-voting shares so they could be sold in the public equity market. In the end, both men were able to stand in front of their fellow executives and employees, share that they had a deal, and wish each other well.

These cases point to four ways to help you and your negotiating partners preserve or save face:

1. Recognize the critical role face plays in all negotiations.
2. Ask yourself if the solution being proposed will cause a loss of face for any party. If so, that has to be addressed, or the answer to any proposal will be no.
3. Map out all the players involved in the negotiation, and recognize that saving face will be even more important if a negotiator has to take a solution back to certain constituents.
4. When a hidden problem arises in negotiation – one that is hard to grasp or does not seem to make logical sense — think about face as the source.

As in many negotiations, what is visible is important. But what is invisible — and connected to face — may be the key to success.

Savvy entrepreneurs are familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk books like #AskGaryVee, Crush It and Crushing It. Those in the social media world know Gary Vaynerchuk as a brilliant marketer and entrepreneur. I had the opportunity to see Vaynerchuk speak before he was a social media phenomenon with eight million Instagram followers, and the lessons he taught that day are ones I still reference today.  

It was 2007, and I was one of a group of 300 entrepreneurs who saw Vaynerchuk at his very first public speaking appearance. We had heard of this crazy Russian with the funny name, but none of us knew what to expect. I remember sitting there listening to Vaynerchuk speak and thinking, “This guy is amazing – but I have no idea what he’s talking about.” 

Social media was still a burgeoning industry in 2007, and frankly, pretty much his entire talk went right over my head. So he finishes with his speech (no notes or PowerPoint, of course) and then says to the audience: “Any questions?”

I looked around the room, and there was an awkward silence. No one raised their hand. So I slowly put my hand up. Vaynerchuk calls on me. I gulp.

I said, “Well Gary, everything you just said was brilliant. But I have no idea what you just said.”

The audience burst into spontaneous laughter and applause. I think a lot of other people were thinking what I was thinking and were glad I spoke up. Vaynerchuk’s response is just one of the brilliant lessons he’s taught me in the decade-plus since then. 

Give away your content for free

When I asked the question, Vaynerchuk didn’t miss a beat. He says to me: “What do you do?”

I said, “I’m a business coach. I help entrepreneurs grow their business and have more financial freedom and time freedom.”

He says, “Perfect! Do you sell books, online courses and coaching programs?”

I said yes.

He says, “Great! Now I want you to start giving away all that stuff for free.”

I sat there, dumbfounded. Remember, this was back in 2007. Today, everyone gives away content to bring attention to their brands and companies. But back then, it seemed like a new concept, at least the way he was saying it. 

Long story short: I followed Vaynerchuk’s advice. (My momma didn’t raise no dummy.) I started giving away my content on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, in videos, on my blog and on podcasts. Following his advice has become one of the cornerstones of my customer acquisition model, arguably the most important one.

Put family first

Soon after that first life-changing meeting with Vaynerchuk, I had a second opportunity to spend time with him — this time, when I hosted him in my car. Vaynerchuk was about to go on his very first book tour, so I called his office, asked for his assistant and told them: “Hey, I’m a huge Gary Vee fan, and I’d love to host him while he’s here in Ohio.”

His assistant said, “Great! We were actually looking for somebody to do that.”

“I’m your man!” I said.

I remember how focused and driven Vaynerchuk was, but the thing that stood out to me the most was how he put family first. Vaynerchuk would take phone call after phone call — with CEOs, celebrities, his staff. Because he was in my car, I couldn’t help hearing his end of the conversation. During many of these important phone calls, he’d say this: “Sorry man, I gotta call you back. My wife’s calling.” Then he would click over to speak with his wife, and without the slightest hint of irritation, he’d say: “Hi honey, what’s up?”

Vaynerchuk’s Twitter profile says “Family First,” but that’s something many people in our industry say without actually following through. But I can tell you from firsthand experience that Vaynerchuk does indeed put his family first. 

Be present

One of the other things I noticed during that trip was how Vaynerchuk never hurried anyone. He was exactly the opposite of many of the divas you see on social media today. For example, after his book signing, I took him to a party that was held in his honor and filled with “Vayniacs” (passionate Gary Vaynerchuk fans).

You might expect the guest of honor to be “too busy” or “too important” to talk to everyone. Well, in many cases, you’d be right. But not our man Gary Vee.

Nope, Vaynerchuk took the time to talk with every single person who wanted to talk with him, no matter how long it took. He was completely present with each person. He looked them in the eyes and really listened to what they were saying. 

Be yourself

One big lesson I learned from spending time with Vaynerchuk is that you have to be yourself (as cliché as it sounds). I swear I’m not making this up, but in the two days I spent with him, I never once saw him go to the bathroom; he ate about enough to fill a hummingbird; and according to his schedule, he slept maybe four hours a night.

I finally asked him about that, and he admitted, “I’ve always had a weird metabolism. I don’t need to eat or sleep much.” (I didn’t press him about the bathroom part.)

That might work for him, but I eat like a horse and need sleep, like a LOT of sleep. Don’t try to be like Vaynerchuk if that’s not your body or your metabolism. 

I’ll always be grateful for the opportunity to spend time with Vaynerchuk and learn from him, as well as for the life and business lessons he taught me that I continue to use today. 

Having researched mindfulness in organizations and for leaders for many years, we advocate its implementation in many situations. But we also believe that when it comes to the ability of individuals and teams to thrive at work, a team’s culture will repeatedly trump most individuals’ mindfulness practice. It’s not enough for people at work to build their capacity for emotional regulation if they’re persistently bullied or work in a toxic team.

That’s why we also advocate the practice of team mindfulness. Just as someone practicing individual mindfulness becomes more self-aware and less judgmental, with team mindfulness, the team becomes more aware and accepting of itself as a team. Its members are collectively aware of the team’s objectives, tasks, roles, dynamics, and structures. That awareness emerges as a result of the team regularly paying attention to these factors, openly and non-judgmentally. This is different from each team member practicing mindfulness on their own — which has its own benefits — instead, it’s about what the team does together.

Groups that develop team mindfulness are demonstrably concerned for the wellbeing of their members. They are collectively aware of the tasks and goals that they share; and they are aware of, and able to address, the dynamics that inevitably flow between team members.

In our work with teams we’ve seen that such groups experience less unhelpful team conflict and are psychologically safer. Whether face-to-face or virtual, groups that are mindful at the team level will do better — especially when faced with a crisis.

Based on our research over the last five years we’ve come to understand individual mindfulness as consisting of three key aspects: allowing, inquiry, and meta-awareness. We now find this a helpful way of describing team mindfulness as well.

Allowing

Allowing is the wisdom to accept present-moment reality and to approach any situation openly and compassionately.

Accepting things as they are doesn’t amount to neglecting your team’s responsibility to change that which should be changed. Rather, it’s about not putting an exorbitant amount of energy into wishing things were different than they actually are or figuring out who is to blame (a common reaction to things going wrong — especially in a crisis). It means avoiding “if only it weren’t like this” discussions and instead asking how to solve the problem together.

Allowing involves embracing team member’s personal experiences, not just their professional ones. Team members encourage one another to share more about themselves (but always give choice here, respecting individual and cultural preferences). The team’s compassion for one another builds as they find out what matters to their colleagues and the circumstances they are in.

In one team we worked with, for example, one of the members seemed to have a constantly critical mindset. Nothing was ever good enough: the team’s performance, the organization, other team members. In a dialogue about the team’s dynamics in which the issue was raised, team came to realize that she set really high standards for herself, and that she suffered from those standards as well. This realization as a group helped her to ease up on herself and also led the team to value her critical perspective.

Any member of a team (not just the team leader!) can ask:

• How can we be compassionate towards ourselves as well as to one another?
• How can we care for and hear our colleagues who have diverse perspectives and circumstances?
• How can we be more accepting of the system wide dynamics such as organizational culture or the reality of a crisis?

Inquiry

Inquiry is the capacity to be curious at three levels: about individual team members and their habits and preferences (including your own); about your team and its dynamics; and about the organizational and societal system around you.

To satisfy this curiosity, teams should  pause, question and enable moments of reflection. In meetings teams tend primarily to focus on the what: advocating results and targets. They also need to include the how: inquiring into the processes of working as a team. Build time for this into your agenda or use action learning for specific, key team challenges which facilitates the discipline to stay in inquiry before jumping to action. Giving the team a moment to stop and reflect lets you identify the habits that serve and that don’t serve the team and its objectives.

One team we worked with was experiencing low engagement — often team members wouldn’t even join video calls or would spend the whole call on mute without contributing. But when one team member initiated a brief check-in at the beginning of each meeting, asking, “How are you showing up today and what impact would you like to have on other members of the team?” suddenly those team members became more talkative.

Teams can ask themselves:

• If there was a way to improve our ability to think creatively together, what would it be?
• Whose voice are we not hearing right now that we need to hear in order to respond well to this situation?
• How will our response right now — to one another, and to our wider system of customers and suppliers — influence the strength of our relationships in the longer term?

Meta-awareness

Meta-awareness is the capacity to observe and describe experiences from an individual, team, and system-wide perspective rather being confined solely within any individual’s personal experiences. Not an either/or — it’s all of the above. You notice your own perspective and that of the team as a whole, all within some degree of awareness of the system as a whole.

Team leaders are often in the best position to enable meta-awareness, but in a mindful team any member should have the space and opportunity to increase mindfulness in meetings, whether they are face-to-face or virtual. That comes about when everyone in the team is consciously enabled to draw attention to what is happening — in the team dynamic and in the present moment.

It can help to use short mindfulness practices to increase steadiness, awareness, and focus. For example, one-minute meditations to begin a meeting, in which individuals simply check in with themselves, focus on the present moment, and form an intention for the meeting.

But more than that, the team should take the space regularly to consider its own dynamics and any patterns it might be stuck in. Team leaders especially should recognize and observe, in real time, how systemic and cultural assumptions influence their perceptions. Taking a deep breath and standing slightly apart from the flow of events, team leaders can come to see things more clearly. That shift to meta-awareness is particularly useful in a crisis when habitual responses embedded in previous ways of responding are no longer adequate.

Finally, consider designating one team member as the “observer” at your next meeting. Their role is to keep the big picture in mind and to remind the team of different ways to develop allowing, inquiry, and meta-awareness. Or ask everyone to share their observations at a particular moment in the agenda.

A construction company we work with had a bright orange chair in each meeting room, in contrast to the rest of the subtle decor. When we commented on this, we were told that it was “the customer’s chair.” In team meetings when issues were being discussed and decisions made, the team would pause and listen to the colleague sitting in the orange chair who would speak as if they were a key customer. They would comment not only on the issue, but also on how the team was working together. This practice gave them a valuable fresh perspective and a pause for thought.

Teams can ask themselves:

• What do we notice that is going on in ourselves and in the team?
• If we were a key customer, supplier, or a junior employee, how would we see this issue?
• If we were to be an observer of this team meeting, what would we notice in terms of communication, psychological safety, assumptions, or focus of attention?

To be sure, there is a business case for team mindfulness. Teams that excel in these three areas will be psychologically safer and better able to innovate; they will experience less churn. But there is also a moral case. People in mindful teams will experience higher levels of wellbeing and job satisfaction. Especially in these times, that’s reason enough.

Are you thinking about going to graduate school? Does getting your Master’s seem like the answer to moving you along your career path? Or maybe starting a new one? Obtaining a graduate degree could be the right answer and it can have a positive effect on your career. However, make sure it fits into your career plan and that you are doing it for the right reasons. You should be sure as to why you want a Master’s. It could be a costly waste of both time and money. Before you decide to pursue a graduate degree, make sure you answer the following three questions.

• Do you know what graduate degree you plan to pursue? 

If you are planning to pursue a graduate degree, you should have a clear understanding of what you want to study. Graduate programs are geared toward a specific subject area and sometimes have concentrations or specializations within the program. It’s important to have a strong interest in the program area that you plan to study. Your interest will keep you motivated and successful. If you are unsure and just know that you want a Master’s degree, first take time for reflection. Then take time to research and ensure you find the right program. You don’t want to end up wasting time and money.

• Will a graduate degree help your career?

Consider whether a graduate degree is something that will help your career. A graduate degree is not always the answer, so be sure to do your research ahead of time. Sometimes getting the actual work experience will move you ahead faster than getting your Master’s degree. Or possibly a graduate certificate versus a degree would be a better option. It all depends on your specific career. Start by researching your career field and job requirements. Ask your professional network for feedback before deciding if getting your Master’s is the right career move for you.

• Are you prepared for graduate school?

Graduate school is an intense program of study that requires a big time commitment and typically involves a large amount of reading and writing. The admission process is competitive and can take several months to complete. Each graduate program will have its own requirements, which may include an entrance exam, undergraduate GPA requirement, recommendations, personal statement, and possibly work experience or prerequisite coursework. In addition to academic preparation, you will need to assess your home and work responsibilities and determine if you are prepared for the time and energy needed to commit to a graduate program. You will need to have that work-life balance during graduate school for success.

At the same time, some of us have also entertained a bit of dreaming: I’m finally going to learn Italian! I’m going to start that side business I keep talking about! I’m going to write the great American novel! There’s even been a less-than-helpful reminder going around on Twitter that Shakespeare managed to write King Lear during a plague. As if to suggest that you, too, should be so inspired and so productive. Personally, I’m a bit tired of the social media suggestions that we are all, suddenly, gifted with a bunch of “free” time that should be put to good use. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never had less time than I have right now, and the time that I do have is best put to use in rest.

But no matter how you might feel about this moment and how you are using it, it’s worth noting: there is a big difference between dreaming about something and actually doing it. Dreams are important. Aspirations and ideas and hope for the future are part of what gives purpose to our lives and keeps us moving forward. We especially need hope in a moment like the present one. If we don’t have hope and a positive mindset that we will end up somewhere different and better than we are, right now, then we might as well just pack it in and succumb to this pandemic. While I certainly can’t speak for everyone, I assume if you’re still reading this that you’re not someone who wants to do that. Nor am I.

How, then, do you make your dreams and hopes a reality? It’s quite simple, really. You stop dreaming and you create a plan and take action. You set realistic goals and action steps that help you to move forward, little by little until you get to where you want to be. It’s simple, but it’s not without work, and that’s the difference between people who achieve their goals and those who don’t. It’s not magic. The ones who get to where they want to be are willing to put in the work. Full stop.

In my experience, people don’t like setting goals. There probably are various reasons for this. For starters, if we never set any goals, we never have to make any forward progress towards achieving them, which gives us an easy excuse for not actually living out our dreams. We all, to some extent, suffer a bit of the impostor syndrome, wondering who we are to dare to imagine a different life than the one we have now. Or we put up obstacles that don’t actually exist, playing out all the what-if’s that might pop up in a bit of analysis-paralysis. What if I start that side business and I can’t manage the number of customers it generates? What if I take that Italian class and realize I’m not any good at it? What if I write a novel and no one wants to publish it? What if, what if, what if. We have to get out of the business of telling ourselves no before others do.

One of my favorite quotes comes from John Maxwell in his book, Mentoring 101. There, he notes, “The greatest achievers in life are people who set goals for themselves and then work hard to reach them. What they get by reaching the goals is not nearly as important as what they become by reaching them.” It can be so easy to focus on the end goal and to forget about the process and the journey. But as Maxwell notes, there is something truly transformative that happens to people who actively set goals and do the work of achieving them. That’s where the real magic happens.

There is interesting research on goal-setting and neuroplasticity that finds that the act of setting goals actually changes your brain. In fact, the more ambitious the goal, and the more motivated you are to achieve it, the more change that happens, which in turn makes you more likely to succeed. You still want to create realistic goals. For example, for me, stating that I have a goal to play the violin on stage at the Kennedy Center is a pretty unrealistic goal for someone who has never touched a violin in her life. Stating that I want to learn to play the violin, on the other hand, is both a stretch goal for me and realistic. I can take classes and learn to play an instrument I’ve never picked up before. Will I be great? Hard to say. Can I do it? Absolutely.

The motivation part of the equation is also something interesting to consider since a big chunk of our lives is spent working on goals that have been given to us by someone else. A syllabus and grading rubric is basically a goal-setting document that outlines what you will be expected to learn over the course of a semester, what tasks you will accomplish in order to achieve that learning goal, and how you will be evaluated. Similarly, at work, we are often presented with a set of goals or OKRs or KPIs to achieve, which have been developed by someone other than ourselves and may not remotely align with our motivation to work. The smart educator and manager would give thought to incorporating the student and employee into this process.

Speaking of process, another stumbling block to effective goal-setting is the actual process of writing effective goal statements. I once heard someone say that most time management courses are taught by people who are strong J’s on the Myers-Briggs and taken by people who are strong P’s. No matter how you feel about the Myers-Briggs as a tool, the point is this: things like time management and goal-setting work well for people who like to-do lists and order and structure. Not so much for those who find their brains are wired a little differently. But whether you love a to-do list or not, there is value in creating a plan. Indeed, research by Wake Forest professor E.J. Masicampo and others has found that during times like the present moment, when there are a lot of interests and needs competing for your attention, the simple act of creating a plan can help not only achieve your goals but also to lessen some of the cognitive load, thus freeing up space to focus on those other needs.

So, whether you’re trying to write the great American novel or start a side business or learn Italian, here’s a process, as written by one of those strong J’s who absolutely loves a to-do list. If this one doesn’t work for you, figure out what does work, and follow that, instead:

• Where do you want to be, six months or a year from now? Write out a vision or overarching goal statement that describes the future state you would like to see. It’s important to keep it to no more than six months to a year. Don’t set yourself up for failure.
• What are your challenges, obstacles, or gaps? Before you move on to goal-setting, take a moment to do a realistic assessment of what may stand in your way. Don’t get hung up here on the what if’s! But acknowledge what challenges in terms of time, money, or other resources may hinder your progress.
• What are three goals you can set to get you closer to your vision? I like a SMART goal model. What are SMART goals? They are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timebound. An example of a SMART goal would be: Complete a first draft of a novel by the end of the year. This goal statement is specific and action-oriented, measurable (what will you do? Complete a draft), achievable and realistic (you have the ability and the resources to accomplish the goal), and timebound (by when? End of the year). Like any good to-do list, your goals should progress over time: first I will do this, then I will do this, then I will do this.
• What are the three action steps you can set for each goal? In a similar fashion, write several concrete action steps that will help you do the work to complete the goal. This is the actual to-do list part. You should be able to check these items off as you progress towards accomplishing your goal.

Hope is not a plan. Your dreams are not a strategy. But they are important first steps. Where do you want to be, and then what’s going to help you get there? Most of us stop with the first part of that equation. We know where we want to be. But the people who turn their dreams into reality are the ones who complete the sentence. Set some goals. Make a plan. And little by little you can make your dreams come true.

Med school, law school, finance, consulting: these were the coveted jobs, the clear paths laid out before us. I took a job in advertising, which was seen as much more rebellious than the reality. I worked in advertising for a few years, and learned an incredible amount about how brands get built and communicated. But I grew restless and bored, tasked with coming up with new campaigns for old and broken products that lacked relevance, unable to influence the products themselves. During that time, I was lucky to have an amazing boss who explained a simple principle that fundamentally altered my path. What she told me was that stress is not about how much you have on your plate; it’s about how much control you have over the outcomes. Suddenly I realized why every Sunday night I was overcome with a feeling of dread. It wasn’t because I had too much going on at work. It was because I had too little power to effect change.

Thirteen years later, I have been fortunate enough to co-found a branding business, and to partner with some of the world’s best entrepreneurs, helping them launch and grow their businesses with brand baked in from the start. As a founder who works alongside many other founders, I’ve seen firsthand what leads to success, as well as what can go wrong. Here are a few principles that I’ve learned along the way, that aspiring entrepreneurs should consider before sending that “I quit!” email that you’ve been fantasizing about:

Identify a problem that you feel driven to solve.

Starting a business is not easy, and scaling it is even harder. But the strongest fuel is a personal connection to what you’re doing. It could be that you have experience working in an industry and understand its shortcomings firsthand. Or perhaps you’re part of a consumer segment that’s underserved by the current offerings. Maybe you’re simply met with a very specific frustration every day, that others are sure to share. However you come to your idea, you should feel like you have no choice but to start this particular business at this moment in time. It will make the mornings when you wake up and wish that it was someone else’s problem much easier to bear.

Consider your role as founder.

More than ever, people care deeply about who’s behind the companies they’re purchasing from. It’s hard to feel a personal connection to a nameless, faceless corporation, and far more rewarding to support brands that are built by individuals with a compelling story. Particularly on social media, so many brands gain traction by having their founders front and center as part of the narrative: speaking to their experiences, demonstrating humility and vulnerability, and putting a human face to the business. This doesn’t mean that in order to start a company you need to be prepared to be a public persona who reveals every aspect of your private life. However, a willingness to communicate directly with your consumers, in whatever form that takes, goes a long way towards establishing an authentic relationship. It gives people a reason not just to love your product, but to root for your company’s success.

Don’t go it alone.

I’m of the opinion that 99.99% of people who are starting businesses should have a co-founder. No matter how much you trust your team, you can never be completely honest about your fears, nor fully share the burden of responsibility when things get difficult. Not to mention the advantage that comes from bringing together complementary skill sets, and the better outcomes that are driven through healthy debate. What’s more, being a founder can be lonely. As everyone’s boss, it becomes very challenging to form real friendships at work — you certainly can’t bond by complaining about leadership anymore. If a co-founder isn’t in the cards, do everything you can to surround yourself with trusted advisors, mentors, and other entrepreneurs.

Determine how you’ll add value to people’s lives.

The startup landscape has gotten so competitive that within one month, you’ll see three nearly identical businesses launch. You may think you’re sitting on a completely original idea, but chances are the same cultural forces that led you to your business plan are also influencing someone else, at this very moment. That doesn’t mean you should give up, or that you should rush to market before you’re ready. It’s not about who’s first, it’s about who does it best, and best these days is the business that delivers the most value to the consumer. Consumers have more power and choice than ever before, and they’re going to choose and stick with the companies who are clearly on their side. How will you make their lives easier, more pleasant, more meaningful? How will you go out of your way for them at every turn? When considering your competitive advantage, start with the needs of the people you’re ultimately there to serve.

Focus on a familiar activity.

Find a task on your to-do list that’s satisfying but so familiar that it’s not taxing — for example, writing the newsletter you’ve been putting together every month for years. Then do it.

Why does this help? When we perform highly familiar tasks, it’s almost as though muscle memory kicks in. All the steps are so practiced that it’s easy to get absorbed in them and to go with the flow. A task you can start and finish in one sitting will also give you a sense of accomplishment.

Tackle an unfamiliar task you’ve been avoiding.

This tip seems contradictory to the previous one, but it works through a different mechanism. Let me explain.

Yesterday I got some bad news. I threw myself into writing a couple of blog posts, as per the last tip. But then I did a task of the “work — but not really work” variety that I’d been putting off. Specifically, I needed to reread my last book to make sure I wasn’t accidentally repeating any points or examples in my upcoming one. 

Tasks that don’t seem to justify a place in your usual workday — but that you struggle to do in your time off — can be a perfect choice on a low-vibe day. Doing something you’ve been avoiding will help you feel like a competent human whose life is on track. 

You might also try things you’d typically overthink — for example, reaching out to a person in your field whom you’d love to work with but don’t know personally — or a task that’s aspirational and creative. Why not put together a talk or an article about why a way of working that’s standard in your industry is misguided, or make a prototype of that pet project you’ve had in mind? When people feel low, scared, or short on self-confidence, they tend to retreat. When you act as though you have confidence in your ideas and capacities, it provides an antidote to those feelings and can stop the negative spiral.  

Do half your usual work.

When you’re down, being productive can help with mood and resilience. Even for clinically depressed people, long leaves of absence from work are rarely recommended. But trying to perform to a high standard when you’ve taken an emotional hit can leave you so drained that you don’t have the energy to process whatever is bothering you. You need some recovery to bounce back.

A good compromise is to do half (or two-thirds of) your usual work. A modest goal like this can prevent you from feeling overwhelmed and procrastinating. If you need to take a mental health day, take one and then resume, making use of the tips described here.

Connect with others.

Loneliness increases stress and reduces productivity. So don’t be scared to be vulnerable with your coworkers; tell at least one person what you’re going through. That will help them understand why you may be a bit less reliable or peppy than usual. 

I’ve written before that our best sources of support during difficult times often aren’t the people with whom we’re closest. Our loose connections sometimes really step up if given a chance. And even small gestures of support from those weak ties can feel extremely helpful, because they’re often unexpected. 

This also means you can avoid oversharing with your family and best friends, which is especially important if those people have a lot going on themselves. And it often results in the weaker relationship growing stronger. 

A caveat: Be sure to share with people you trust — who won’t assume you’ll be completely useless at work just because you’re having some personal stress.

Drop your fear of negative emotions.

There’s no need to worry that difficult emotions will destroy your productivity. In fact, work can be a refuge when you’re in turmoil. I find that sad emotions enhance my creativity and productivity. Anger (especially at being underestimated) tends to make me feel more determined. Anxiety has a more mixed impact. 

So although no one should act like a robot capable of soldiering on through any situation, don’t assume that difficult emotions will negatively impact your work. The key is to use those feelings to propel you rather than try to sweep them under the rug.

When people are experiencing overwhelming, difficult emotions, their instinct may be to spend all day browsing the internet or to drown themselves in work as a distraction. But there are options between those extremes that can help you feel better, bounce back faster, and regain your confidence to handle whatever personal situations you’re facing. 

Fortunately, even in a remote environment there are several approaches that can help you solve complex problems effectively.

Get a wide reach

When you and others work together to generate a new solution to a problem, it’s important to remember that you’re doing so by taking advantage of the collected knowledge in the heads of the people involved in the process. The description of the problem serves as a cue for them to reach into their memory and retrieve related information.

Determining who is involved in a brainstorm is therefore critical. Prior to the pandemic, in many organizations it was often hard to get a broad group of people together, because of their varying schedules and/or locations. But because our default was to have in-person meetings, we didn’t engage much with people who couldn’t be physically present as part of the idea-generation process. And we knew that hybrid meetings in which some people are present and some are online are generally a horrible experience for those attending remotely.

One advantage of working remotely is that it’s now easier to bring in a broader group of participants. You have to do this carefully, though. Don’t start with a list of people you want involved in your brainstorming session. Instead, identify the roles and expertise you want, and then find people who fit that description. Ask your colleagues for recommendations of people you might not know who have relevant expertise. This will help you ensure that the group you bring together is more diverse, bringing a range of different backgrounds and perspectives to the problem-solving task.

Take advantage of scheduling difficulties

When people are working remotely, it can be difficult to get everyone scheduled for meetings at the same time, particularly if people are spread across time zones. For brainstorming, though, this can be a blessing. Because you actually don’t need the group to be together to come up with the best ideas.

The groupthink theory shows that, during idea generation, individuals think differently about a problem if they work alone. But when you bring the group together to generate ideas, they tend to think alike, converging on a common solution.

So start your brainstorming process by having each person generate potential solutions on their own, or perhaps have them work in small groups to think about possibilities. What you want to avoid is having the entire group start throwing out ideas at one another—which isn’t ideal in a remote environment anyway. Make sure everyone has had a chance to engage and work on the problem first. One way to do that is to have small groups capture their ideas in a document. A second is to have group members send their initial thoughts to you and to compile them before anyone starts to discuss them.

After that initial stage, collect the solutions that have been generated and send them around to the group to build on them. Create a shared document with the preliminary ideas that everyone can edit, and invite people to further develop the initial proposals. When you read over the collection of ideas that have come in, you might also find that some of the proposals would benefit from the expertise of someone who is not already part of the group. One great thing about having this process extend out over time is that it gives you opportunities to engage new people who can bring valuable perspectives to the problem. Then, later in the process, you can bring the entire group together to discuss the most promising ideas and to reach a consensus about a small number of options to be considered further.

Get specific

There’s a lot of research showing that the more distant you are from something in time, space, or socially, the more abstractly you think about it. This is called construal-level theory. In a remote working environment, this means that you are often physically distant from the site of the problems you’re trying to solve and you therefore think about them more abstractly.

Initially, that abstraction can be a good thing. If you start with a general representation of a problem, you increase the chances that you’ll be reminded of something that comes from another area of your expertise. Abstraction, in other words, can help you to find good analogies to provide insight.

The danger, though, is that you will stay up in the clouds, failing to come up with specific solutions. And it’s hard for people to respond to and build on generic ideas.

We’re going through this process right now at the University of Texas, as we plan for our fall semester during the Covid-19 pandemic. I’m leading the working group that is planning our academic offerings. For the past several weeks, we’ve created a specific scenario for not only the mix of classes that would meet in-person and online but also other factors such as the maximum occupancy of classrooms and the use of cloth masks by students, staff, and faculty.

Each week, more than 250 people comment on the scenario and point out potential problems. Not surprisingly, that means it changes considerably. Because the scenario is specific, it leads people to think about issues that might not have come up if the discussion remained abstract. For example, we’ve had to grapple with finding spaces for students on campus who have a class in-person followed by one taking place online. Where will those students sit to attend the online class? It’s not clear that this problem would have surfaced if we weren’t envisioning the solution in detail.

This process of iterative design requires that everyone be willing to treat the elements of that design as tentative from the start. If key people start to defend early decisions, then group members disengage. But, when people see that the specific scenario changes from one version to the next, then they remain committed to improving it.

You may have a co-worker who is silently struggling right now. The global coronavirus pandemic is still affecting millions of people and has completely upended all our old ways of living and working, leading to a lot of extra stress we may not even be able to fully acknowledge.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the top job-related stressors during the pandemic include: 

• Concern about the risk of being exposed to the virus at work
• Taking care of personal and family needs while working
• Managing a different workload
• Lack of access to the tools and equipment needed to perform your job
• Feelings that you are not contributing enough to work or guilt about not being on the front line
• Uncertainty about the future of your workplace and/or employment
• Learning new communication tools and dealing with technical difficulties
• Adapting to a different workspace and/or work schedule

In other words, there could be many reasons your co-worker is off their game right now. Lisa Orbé-Austin, a licensed psychologist and executive coach, said the pandemic makes it harder for workers to disconnect from their jobs, and this is leading to burnout.

“I’m hearing a lot of fatigue,” she said. “People feel very tired, [they are] feeling a sense of disconnection from all of their roles, including parenting, and are just feeling not great at anything right now.” 

Different colleagues are experiencing different realities with regard to social isolation and caretaking responsibilities. “What works for you right now is not likely to be what is going to work for somebody else,” said Liane Davey, a team effectiveness adviser and author of “The Good Fight: Use Productive Conflict to Get Your Team and Organization Back on Track.”

Both experts agreed it is good to watch out for changes in behavior that signal a colleague may need support. Here are some marked changes in behavior to watch out for:

1. Your colleague is more distracted and absent. 

Orbé-Austin said to look for unusual ways your colleague is showing up in the workspace. 

“You can see them overly flustered in ways you’re not used to typically seeing them,” Orbé-Austin said. “They’re missing appointments or missing events, or they just feel scattered in a way that doesn’t seem normative for them.” 

2. They’re moodier from the stress. 

Everyone has good days and bad days, but a marked change in behavior like edginess, frustration and irritability are signs to watch out for. 

“Stress can show up as your co-worker seeming irritable, on edge, or even defensive. They may overly focus on worries and concerns, such as all the reasons why a project isn’t going well,” said licensed social worker and executive coach Melody Wilding. 

You are more than likely familiar with Entrepreneur’s popular show “Elevator Pitch,” in which entrepreneurs pitch their company to a board of investors during a 60-second elevator ride. If the investors like the pitch, the elevator doors open and the entrepreneur is invited into the board room to potentially make a deal.

This show’s premise is of course inspired by concept that people in business have embraced for decades now: that a truly good idea can be summed up in the span of an elevator ride.

But this poses a significant dilemma. As an entrepreneur, you’ve likely been toiling away at your idea for some time, possibly even years. How are you supposed to cram all of the value you’ve created in so little time? And if you’re making a pitch in order to attract investments, how can you describe your work in a compelling way, while demonstrating viability in the marketplace, while asking for capital?

You may be surprised to find out that there is a way you can craft your elevator pitch to not only create greater interest in your product or service, but actually give people chills in under twenty seconds.

How people usually do elevator pitches

Among those who put thought into their elevator pitches, there tends to be two basic formulas:

Formula A: Introduce oneself and the name of the company, then describe the product or service in the context of the customer or industry’s pain point. Then, at the end, make the ask.

Formula B: Identify the pain point before introducing oneself and the name of the company. Then describe the product or service, followed by the ask.

While I’m adamant that the only hard and fast rule of communication is that there are no hard and fast rules, I favor Formula B. People are most likely to embrace a solution when it’s provided within the context of a problem they care about solving. By starting with a pain point, the entrepreneur is speaking to what an uninformed audience cares about right away thus making sure that the first thing their audience hears has intrinsic value to them. This helps the audience become immediately invested in solving the problem, which helps the entrepreneur to build some momentum.

What further helps with this momentum is identifying a hole in the marketplace. Sometimes this hole is defined by a new need as dictated by circumstance (e.g. the invention and commercialization of the Internet led to a sudden need for accessing it), while other times it’s defined by the inadequacy of existing solutions (e.g. introducing broadband Internet connectivity as a superior alternative to dial-up). Still other times the hole is defined by a problem that the audience doesn’t actually know they have (e.g. how to access the Internet without wires when the marketplace was introduced to Wi-Fi).

What all of these different holes have in common, however, is that they are highlighting the typical solutions that don’t work — or that don’t work as well. This helps the entrepreneur to build momentum because it highlights why the pain point is as powerful as it is — why it’s seemingly so hard to make that pain go away.  

However, there is one ingredient that nearly every entrepreneur overlooks. It can redefine not only elevator pitches, but presentations, speeches, webinars, articles, and even books.

And this ingredient can make your captive audience in that elevator get chills in twenty seconds or less.

An example from an unlikely source

You may remember the 2011 film Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. Based on a true story, Pitt plays the general manager of the Oakland Athletics in 2002. His and Hill’s characters implement a fundamentally different approach to building a Major League Baseball team, and eventually win twenty games in a row, the most consecutive wins in the American League at that time. What is perhaps most significant about their season, though, is how they tied the New York Yankees for the most wins in the American League with a roster that cost a small fraction of the New York roster.

Toward the beginning of the film, Hill gives a little speech to Pitt that can be considered an elevator pitch of sorts — he has a short amount of time to capture Pitt’s attention.

Hill explains to Pitt that there is an “epidemic failure” in how the leaders in most Major League teams manage their teams. He explains that by filling their rosters with expensive star players, they are fundamentally misunderstanding what it takes to have a winning ball club.

Where the conversation becomes interesting, though, is that he then describes this flawed approach as baseball clubs’ desire to buy players. He states that the point shouldn’t be to buy players, the point should be to buy wins. And to get wins one needs to get runs.

Everyone could benefit from some professional renewal during this time of year.

Five Tips to Help Spring Clean Your Career:

1. Prioritize Your Workday

Do you find that the day gets away from you without completing what was on your to-do list? It may be time to reevaluate and prioritize your work. Make a list of your top five work priorities and focus on completing them. Try not to get distracted or sidetracked by last-minute requests or less important assignments. Use the technique of time blocking to help you focus and complete work on time. Plan ahead and schedule blocks of time on your calendar for specific work projects and stick to it.

2. Update Your Resume

Updating your resume at least once a year will help keep track of your work responsibilities, accomplishments, and new skills or training. An updated resume will ensure that you are prepared for unexpected professional opportunities. Reviewing and revising your resume’s Professional Summary statement is also a good refresher for those networking events when you need to tell others about yourself.

3. Enhance your LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn is a great tool for professional networking and industry information. It is also a resource that a majority of employers use to post jobs and search for candidates. Create a LinkedIn profile if you don’t have one yet or enhance your current one.  Add specific degrees or certifications to follow your name, update your professional headline with keywords that describe you, and keep your summary and experience current.

4. Increase your professional development

Stay current with your industry by making time for professional development. Join a professional organization, attend a work conference, participate in a panel – get involved. It will help expand your knowledge and network at the same time.  Determine if you need to brush up on any skills or acquire new ones to stay current. Think about ways to increase your professional development so that you continue to grow and move forward.

5. Reach out and expand your network

Are you in touch with your professional network and do you need to expand it? Make an effort to keep in touch on a regular basis with those in your network and try to expand it to include others outside your regular circles. Building and sustaining your network is a key factor in your success, especially as over 70% of jobs are found through networking.  

The chatter in our cafeterias and conference rooms is replaced by the disquiet we’re experiencing inside our socially-distanced bubbles. From general malaise to specific maladies, many employees are afflicted by stress and anxiety that make brushing teeth and cooking a meal feel like the day’s crowning achievements. My clients, executives in a variety of organizations, feel overworked, underappreciated, and cut off from their colleagues. While there’s no panacea for these current ills, regularly practicing gratitude can help.

Research clearly indicates expressing gratitude is beneficial to our health and well-being. We’re happier when we’re grateful. During a crisis, taking the time to thank others is vital to dampen loneliness, amp up social connections, and generate generosity. Yet, while the benefits of gratitude are widely acknowledged, we feel thankful a lot more often than we express it — and it seems to be least often expressed at work.

As managers, it’s essential to express gratitude to your employees, especially now. For one thing, being thankful to your team is the right thing to do. People are battling fears about the pandemic and juggling home and work in close proximity. Almost every employee needs to hear that their dedication is noticed and it matters. What’s more, gratitude is proven to show improvements in self-esteem, achieving career goals, decision making, productivity, and resilience.

Yet for busy and stressed-out leaders, it can be easy to put gratitude at the end of a to-do list. During our last coaching session, Mandeep, a senior academic executive, said, “I’m so busy fighting fires from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. that I don’t have time to acknowledge the work my team is doing.” Recognizing that expressing appreciation is more important than ever, we devised five strategies for Mandeep and his organization.

Bring people together for a gratitude shower. Every evening at 7 p.m., people in my neighborhood (and in cities around the world) gather on our balconies and in the streets to applaud essential workers for their sacrifices. Mandeep created the organizational equivalent of this activity by asking everyone to join a live chat at 4 p.m. daily for exactly two minutes. In this time, team members type out compliments for colleagues. Since these notes are written and saved in a chat, people can scroll through past kudos if they miss a session. Use this kind of appreciative communication to foster community by coming together for a daily dose of applause.

Tailor your thanks. Research shows gratitude strengthens relationships much more when it is conveyed as appreciation for what the